1 


'\^H*Vt«snY  OP 
CALIPOIiNlA 
SAM  DIEGO 


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I 


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3  1822  01600  1372 


Central  University  Library 

University  of  California,  San  Diego 
Note:  This  item  is  subject  to  recall  after  two  weeks. 

Date  Due 


MAY  2  4  1QQ^ 

ivin  f    w  ^   lODO 

JUNOfi  1993 

0139(1/91) 


UCSDLib. 


m 


THE  CHILDREN 


Digitized  by  tine  Internet  Arciiive 

in  2007  witii  funding  from 

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^cy^^i^ 


THE  CHILDREN 

BY  ALICES  MEYNELL 


U^ 


JOHN  LANE;  THE  BODLEY  HEAD 
NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON  1897 


Copyright,  i8g6, 
by  John  Lane. 


Co  Zhttr  Beet  frtendo 


CONTENTS 


FELLOW  TEAVELLERS  WITH  A  BIRD,  I. 

9 

FELLOW  TRAVELLERS  WITH  A  BIRD,  II 

17 

CHILDREN  IN  MIDWINTER 

25 

THAT  PRETTY  PERSON       . 

35 

OUT  OF  TOWN 

45 

EXPRESSION 

53 

UNDER  THE  EARLY  STARS 

57 

THE  MAN  WITH  TWO  HEADS 

63 

CHILDREN  IN  BURLESQUE 

69 

AUTHORSHIP 

75 

LETTERS 

81 

THE  FIELDS 

87 

THE  BARREN  SHORE 

93 

THE  BOY       . 

lOI 

ILLNESS 

107 

THE  YOUNG  CHILD 

113 

FAIR  AND  BROWN 

121 

REAL  CHILDHOOD 

129 

FELLOW  TRAVELLERS 
WITH  A  BIRD. 

[O  attend  to  a  living  child  is  to  be 
baffled  in  your  humour,  disap- 
pointed of  your  pathos,  and  set 
freshly  free  from  all  the  pre-occu- 
pations.  You  cannot  anticipate 
him.  Blackbirds,  overheard  year  by  year,  do  not 
compose  the  same  phrases  ;  never  tw^o  leitmotifs 
alike.  Not  the  tone,  but  the  note  alters.  So  with 
the  uncovenated  ways  of  a  child  you  keep  no  tryst. 
They  meet  you  at  another  place,  after  failing  you 
where  you  tarried  ;  your  former  experiences,  your 
documents  are  at  fault.  You  are  the  fellow  travel- 
ler of  a  bird.  The  bird  alights  and  escapes  out  of 
time  to  your  footing. 

No  man's  fancy  could  be  beforehand,  for  in- 
stance, with  a  girl  of  four  years  old  who  dictated  a 
letter  to  a  distant  cousin,  with  the  sweet  and  un- 
imaginable message:  "I  hope  you  enjoy  yourself 
with  your  loving  dolls."  A  boy,  still  younger, 
persuading  his  mother  to  come   down   from  her 


lo  Fellow  Travellers  with  a  Bird. 

heights  and  play  with  him  on  the  floor,  but  sen- 
sible, perhaps,  that  there  was  a  dignity  to  be  ob- 
served none  the  less,  entreated  her,  **  Mother,  do 
be  a  lady  frog. ' '  None  ever  said  their  good  things 
before  these  indeliberate  authors.  Even  their  own 
kind — children — have  not  preceded  them.  No 
child  in  the  past  ever  found  the  same  replies  as  the 
girl  of  five  whose  father  made  that  appeal  to  feeling 
which  is  doomed  to  a  different,  perverse,  and  un- 
foreseen success.  He  was  rather  tired  with  writing, 
and  had  a  mind  to  snare  some  of  the  yet  un cap- 
tured flock  of  her  sympathies.  **  Do  you  know,  I 
have  been  working  hard,  darling?  I  work  to  buy 
things  for  you."  "Do  you  work,"  she  asked, 
**to  buy  the  lovely  puddin's?"  Yes,  even  for 
these.  The  subject  must  have  seemed  to  her  to  be 
worth  pursuing.  **  And  do  you  work  to  buy  the 
fat?     I  don't  like  fat." 

The  sympathies,  nevertheless,  are  there.  The 
same  child  was  to  be  soothed  at  night  after  a  weep- 
ing dream  that  a  skater  had  been  drowned  in  the 
Kensington  Round  Pond.  It  was  suggested  to  her 
that  she  should  forget  it  by  thinking  about  the  one 
unfailing  and  gay  subject — her  wishes.  **  Do  you 
know,"  she  said,  without  loss  of  time,  "w^hat  I 
should  like  best  in  all  the  world?  A  thundred  dolls 
and  a  whistle!"  Her  mother  was  so  overcome 
by  this  tremendous  numeral,  that  she  could  make 


Fellow  Travellers  with  a  Bird.  i  i 

no  ofFer  as  to  the  dolls.  But  the  whistle  seemed 
practicable.  "It  is  for  me  to  whistle  for  cabs," 
said  the  child,  with  a  sudden  moderation,  *<when 
I  go  to  parties."  Another  morning  she  came 
down  radiant,  **  Did  you  hear  a  great  noise  in  the 
miggle  of  the  night  ?  That  was  me  crying.  I  cried 
because  T  dreamt  that  Cuckoo  [a  brother]  had 
swallowed  a  bead  into  his  nose." 

The  mere  errors  of  children  are  unforeseen  as 
nothing  is — ^no,  nothing  feminine — ^in  this  adult 
world.  **I've  got  a  lotter  than  you,"  is  the  word 
of  a  very  young  egotist.  An  older  child  says, 
"I'd  better  go,  bettern't  I,  mother  ? "  He  calls 
a  little  space  at  the  back  of  a  London  house,  *'the 
backy-garden."  A  little  creature  proffers  almost 
daily  the  reminder  at  luncheon — at  tart-time : 
**  Father,  I  hope  you  will  remember  that  I  am  the 
favourite  of  the  crust."  Moreover,  if  an  author 
set  himself  to  invent  the  naif  things  that  children 
might  do  in  their  Christmas  plays  at  home,  he 
would  hardly  light  upon  the  device  of  the  little 
troupe  who,  having  no  footlights,  arranged  upon 
the  floor  a  long  row  of — candle-shades  ! 

**It's  jolly  dull  without  you,  mother,"  says  a 
little  girl  who — gentlest  of  the  gentle — has  a  dra- 
matic sense  of  slang,  of  which  she  makes  no  secret. 
But  she  drops  her  voice  somewhat  to  disguise  her 
feats  of  metathesis,  about  which  she  has  doubts  and 


1 2  Fellow  Travellers  with  a  Bird. 

which  are  involuntary  :  the  "  stand- wash,"  the 
"sweeping-crosser,"  the  **  sewing  chamine." 
Genoese  peasants  have  the  same  prank  when  they 
try  to  speak  Italian. 

Children  forget  last  year  so  well  that  if  they  are 
Londoners  they  should  by  any  means  have  an  im- 
pression of  the  country  or  the  sea  annually.  A 
London  little  girl  watches  a  fly  upon  the  wing,  fol- 
lows it  with  her  pointing  finger,  and  names  it 
**bird."  Her  brother,  who  wants  to  play  with 
a  bronze  Japanese  lobster,  asks  **  Will  you  please 
let  me  have  that  tiger  ? " 

At  times  children  give  to  a  word  that  slight  var- 
iety which  is  the  most  touching  kind  of  newness. 
Thus,  a  child  of  three  asks  you  to  save  him.  How 
moving  a  word,  and  how  freshly  said  !  He  had 
heard  of  the  ** saving"  of  other  things  of  interest 
— especially  chocolate  creams  taken  for  safe-keep- 
ing— and  he  asks,  '*  Who  is  going  to  save  me  to- 
day ?  Nurse  is  going  out,  will  you  save  me, 
mother  ?  "  The  same  little  variant  upon  common 
use  is  in  another  child's  courteous  reply  to  a  sum- 
mons to  help  in  the  arrangement  of  some  flowers, 
"I  am  quite  at  your  ease." 

A  child,  unconscious  little  author  of  things  told 
in  this  record,  was  taken  lately  to  see  a  fellow 
author  of  somewhat  difi«rent  standing  from  her 
own,  inasmuch  as  he  is,  among  other  things,  a  Sat- 


Fellow  Travellers  with  a  Bird.  13 

urday  Reviewer.  As  he  dwelt  in  a  part  of  the 
South-west  of  the  town  unknown  to  her,  she  noted 
with  interest  the  shops  of  the  neighbourhood  as  she 
went,  for  they  might  be  those  oi  the  fournisseurs  of 
her  friend.  "That  is  his  bread  shop,  and  that  is 
his  book  shop.  And  that,  mother,"  she  said  fin- 
ally, with  even  heightened  sympathy,  pausing  be- 
fore a  blooming  parterre  of  confectionery  hard  by 
the  abode  of  her  man  of  letters,  **that,  I  suppose, 
is  where  he  buys  his  sugar  pigs." 

In  all  her  excursions  into  streets  new  to  her,  this 
same  child  is  intent  upon  a  certain  quest — the  quest 
of  a  genuine  colleaor.  We  have  all  heard  of  col- 
lecting butterflies,  of  collecting  china-dogs,  of  col- 
lecting cocked  hats,  and  so  forth ;  but  her  pursuit 
gives  her  a  joy  that  costs  her  nothing  except  a 
sharp  look-out  upon  the  proper  names  over  all  shop- 
windows.  No  hoard  was  ever  lighter  than  hers. 
♦*  I  began  three  weeks  ago  next  Monday,  mother," 
she  says  with  precision,  "and  I  have  got  thirty- 
nine.  "      "  Thirty-nine  what  ? "      "  Smiths. ' ' 


FELLOW  TRAVELLERS 
WITH  A  BIRD.     IL 


# 


FELLOW  TRAVELLERS 
WITH  A  BIRD.    11. 

!HE  mere  gathering  of  children's 
language  would  be  much  like  col- 
lecting together  a  handful  of  flow- 
ers that  should  be  all  unique, 
single  of  their  kind.  In  one  thing, 
however,  do  children  agree,  and  that  is  the  rejec- 
tion of  most  of  the  conventions  of  the  authors  who 
have  reported  them.  They  do  not,  for  example, 
say  *'me  is  ;  "  their  natural  reply  to  **  are  you?" 
is  *'I  are."  One  child,  pronouncing  sweetly  and 
neatly,  will  have  nothing  but  the  nominative  pro- 
noun. **  Lift  I  up  and  let  I  see  it  raining,"  she 
bids  ;  and  told  that  it  does  not  rain,  resumes,  "Lift 
I  up  and  let  I  see  it  not  raining." 

An  elder  child  had  a  rooted  dislike  to  a  brown 
corduroy  suit  ordered  for  her  by  maternal  authority. 
She  wore  the  garments  under  protest,  and  with 
some  resentment.  At  the  same  time  it  was  evident 
that  she  took  no  pleasure  in  hearing  her  praises 
sweetly  sung  by  a  poet,  her  friend.    He  had  imag- 

3 


1 8         Fellow  Travellers  with  a  Bird. 

ined  the  making  of  this  child  in  the  counsels  of 
Heaven,  and  the  decreeing  of  her  soft  skin,  of  her 
brilliant  eyes,  and  of  her  hair — "a  brown  tress." 
She  had  gravely  heard  the  words  as  "  a  brown 
dress,"  and  she  silently  bore  the  poet  a  grudge  for 
having  been  the  accessory  of  Providence  in  the  man- 
date that  she  should  wear  the  loathed  corduroy. 
The  unpractised  ear  played  another  little  girl  a  like 
turn.  She  had  a  phrase  for  snubbing  any  anecdote 
that  sounded  improbable.  **  That,"  she  said,  more 
or  less  after  Sterne,  "is  a  cotton-wool  story." 

The  learning  of  words  is,  needless  to  say,  con- 
tinued long  after  the  years  of  mere  learning  to  speak. 
The  young  child  now  takes  a  current  word  into  use, 
a  little  at  random,  and  now  makes  a  new  one,  so 
as  to  save  the  interruption  of  a  pause  for  search.  I 
have  certainly  detected,  in  children  old  enough  to 
show  their  motives,  a  conviction  that  a  word  of 
their  own  making  is  as  good  a  communication  as 
another,  and  as  intelligible.  There  is  even  a  gen- 
eral implicit  conviction  among  them  that  the  grown- 
up people,  too,  make  words  by  the  wayside  as 
occasion  befalls.  How  otherwise  should  words  be 
so  numerous  that  every  day  brings  forward  some 
hitherto  unheard  ?  The  child  would  be  surprised 
to  know  how  irritably  poets  are  refused  the  faculty 
and  authority  which  he  thinks  to  belong  to  the  com- 
mon world. 


Fellow  Travellers  with  a  Bird.         19 

There  is  something  very  cheerfiil  and  courageous 
in  the  setting  out  of  a  child  on  a  journey  of  speech 
with  so  small  baggage  and  with  so  much  confidence 
in  the  chances  of  the  hedge.  He  goes  free,  a  sim- 
ple adventurer.  Nor  does  he  make  any  officious 
eflfort  to  invent  anything  strange  or  particularly 
expressive  or  descriptive.  The  child  trusts  genially 
to  his  hearer.  A  very  young  boy,  excited  by  his 
first  sight  of  sunflowers,  was  eager  to  describe  them, 
and  called  them,  without  allowing  himself  to  be 
checked  for  the  trifle  of  a  name,  **  summersets." 
This  was  simple  and  unexpected  ;  so  was  the  com- 
ment of  a  sister  a  very  little  older.  "  Why  does 
he  call  those  flowers  summersets  ?  ' '  their  mother 
said ;  and  the  girl,  with  a  darkly  brilliant  look  of 
humour  and  penetration,  answered,  **  because  they 
are  so  big."  There  seemed  to  be  no  further  ques- 
tion possible  after  an  explanation  that  was  presented 
thus  charged  with  meaning. 

To  a  later  phase  of  life,  when  a  httle  girl's 
vocabulary  was,  somewhat  at  random,  growing 
larger,  belong  a  few  brave  phrases  hazarded  to  ex- 
press a  meaning  well  realized — a  personal  matter. 
Questioned  as  to  the  eating  of  an  uncertain  number 
of  buns  just  before  lunch,  the  child  averred,  "I 
took  them  just  to  appetize  my  hunger."  As  she 
betrayed  a  familiar  knowledge  of  the  tariff  of  an  at- 
tractive  confectioner,  she  was   asked    whether  she 


20         Fellow  Travellers  with  a  Bird. 

and  her  sisters  had  been  frequenting  those  little  tables 
on  their  way  from  school.  "I  sometimes  go  in 
there,  mother,"  she  confessed;  *'but  I  generally 
speculate  outside." 

Children  sometimes  attempt  to  cap  something 
perfectly  funny  with  something  so  flat  that  you  are 
obliged  to  turn  the  conversation.  Dryden  does  the 
same  thing,  not  with  jokes,  but  with  his  sublimer 
passages.  But  sometimes  a  child's  deliberate  banter 
is  quite  intelligible  to  elders.  Take  the  letter  writ- 
ten by  a  little  girl  to  a  mother  who  had,  it  seems, 
allowed  her  family  to  see  that  she  was  inclined  to 
be  satisfied  with  something  of  her  own  writing. 
The  child  has  a  full  and  gay  sense  of  the  sweetest 
kinds  of  irony.  There  was  no  need  for  her  to 
write,  she  and  her  mother  being  both  at  home,  but 
the  words  must  have  seemed  to  her  worthy  of  a  pen: 
— **  My  dear  mother,  I  really  wonder  how  you 
can  be  proud  of  that  article,  if  it  is  worthy  to  be 
called  a  article,  which  I  doubt.  Such  a  unletter- 
ary  article.  I  cannot  call  it  letter ature.  I  hope  you 
will  not  write  any  more  such  unconventionan  trash. ' ' 

This  is  the  saying  of  a  httle  boy  who  admired 
his  much  younger  sister,  and  thought  her  forward 
for  her  age  :  "I  wish  people  knew  just  how  old  she 
is,  mother,  then  they  would  know  she  is  onward. 
They  can  see  she  is  pretty,  but  they  can't  know 
she  is  such  a  onward  baby." 


Fellow  Travellers  with  a  Bird.  2 1 

Thus  speak  the  naturally  unreluctant ;  but  there 
are  other  children  who  in  time  betray  a  little  con- 
sciousness and  a  slight  mefiance  as  to  where  the  adult 
sense  of  humour  may  be  lurking  in  wait  for  them, 
obscure.  These  children  may  not  be  shy  enough 
to  suffer  any  self-checking  in  their  talk,  but  they 
are  now  and  then  to  be  heard  slurring  a  word  of 
which  they  do  not  feel  too  sure.  A  little  girl  whose 
sensitiveness  was  barely  enough  to  cause  her  to  stop 
to  choose  between  two  words,  was  wont  to  bring 
a  cup  of  tea  to  the  writing-table  of  her  mother,  who 
had  often  feigned  indignation  at  the  weakness  of 
what  her  Irish  maid  always  called  **  the  infusion." 
**I'm  afraid  it's  bosh  again,  mother,"  said  the 
child ;  and  then,  in  a  half-whisper,  *'  Is  bosh 
right,  or  wash,  mother  ? ' '  She  was  not  told,  and 
decided  for  herself,  with  doubts,  for  bosh.  The 
afternoon  cup  left  the  kitchen  an  infusion,  and 
reached  the  library  "bosh"  thenceforward. 


CHILDREN  IN  MIDWINTER. 


CHILDREN  IN  MIDWINTER. 

'  HILDREN  are  so  flowerlike  that 
it  is  always  a  little  fresh  surprise 
to  see  them  blooming  in  winter. 
Their  tenderness,  their  down,  their 
colour,  their  fiilness — which  is  like 
that  of  a  thick  rose  or  of  a  tight  grape — look  out  of 
season.  Children  in  the  withering  wind  are  like 
the  soft  golden-pink  roses  that  fill  the  barrows  in 
Oxford  Street,  breathing  a  southern  calm  on  the 
north  wind.  The  child  has  something  better  than 
warmth  in  the  cold,  something  more  subtly  out  of 
place  and  more  delicately  contrary  ;  and  that  is 
coolness.  To  be  cool  in  the  cold  is  the  sign  of  a 
vitality  quite  exquisitely  alien  from  the  common 
conditions  of  the  world.  It  is  to  have  a  naturally, 
and  not  an  artificially,  diiFerent  and  separate 
climate. 

We  can  all  be  more  or  less  warm — ^with  fiir, 
with  skating,  with  tea,  with  fire,  and  with  sleep — 
in  the  winter.  But  the  child  is  fresh  in  the  wind, 
and   wakes   cool  from   his   dreams,   dewy  when 


26  Children  in  Midwinter. 

there  is  hoar-frost  everywhere  else;  he  is  "more 
lovely  and  more  temperate  "  than  the  summer  day 
and  than  the  w^inter  day  alike.  He  overcomes 
both  heat  and  cold  by  another  climate,  which  is 
the  climate  of  life  ;  but  that  victory  of  life  is  more 
delicate  and  more  surprising  in  the  tyranny  of 
January.  By  the  sight  and  the  touch  of  children, 
we  are,  as  it  were,  indulged  with  something  finer 
than  a  fruit  or  a  flower  in  untimely  bloom.  The 
childish  bloom  is  always  untimely.  The  fruit  and 
flower  will  be  common  later  on  ;  the  strawberries 
will  be  a  matter  of  course  anon,  and  the  asparagus 
dull  in  its  day.  But  a  child  is  a  perpetual 
primeur. 

Or  rather  he  is  not  in  truth  always  untimely. 
Some  few  days  in  the  year  are  his  own  season — 
unnoticed  days  of  March  or  April,  soft,  fresh  and 
equal,  when  the  child  sleeps  and  rises  with  the 
sun.  Then  he  looks  as  though  he  had  his  brief 
season,  and  ceases  for  a  while  to  seem  strange. 

It  is  no  wonder  that  we  should  try  to  attribute 
the  times  of  the  year  to  children  ;  their  likeness  is 
so  rife  among  annuals.  For  man  and  woman  we 
are  naturally  accustomed  to  a  longer  rhythm ;  their 
metre  is  so  obviously  their  own,  and  of  but  a  single 
stanza,  without  repetition,  without  renewel,  with- 
out refrain.  But  it  is  by  an  intelligible  illusion 
that  we  look  for  a  quick  waxing  and  waning  in  the 


Children  in  Midwinter.  27 

lives  of  young  children — for  a  waxing  that  shall 
come  again  another  time,  and  for  a  waning  that 
shall  not  be  final,  shall  not  be  fatal.  But  every 
winter  shows  us  how  human  they  are,  and  how 
they  are  little  pilgrims  and  visitants  among  the 
things  that  look  like  their  kin.  For  every  winter 
shows  them  free  from  the  east  wind ;  more  per- 
fectly than  their  elders,  they  enclose  the  climate  of 
life.  And,  moreover,  with  them  the  climate  of 
life  is  the  climate  of  the  spring  of  life  ;  the  climate 
of  a  human  March  that  is  sure  to  make  a  constant 
progress,  and  of  a  human  April  that  never  hesitates. 
The  child  ** breathes  April  and  May" — an  inner 
April  and  his  own  May. 

The  winter  child  looks  so  much  the  more 
beautiful  for  the  season  as  his  most  brilliant  uncles 
and  aunts  look  less  well.  He  is  tender  and  gay  in 
the  east  wind.  Now  more  than  ever  must  the 
lover  beware  of  making  a  comparison  between  the 
beauty  of  the  admired  woman  and  the  beauty  of  a 
child.  He  is  indeed  too  wary  ever  to  make  it. 
So  is  the  poet.  As  comparisons  are  necessary  to 
him,  he  will  pay  a  frankly  impossible  homage,  and 
compare  a  woman's  face  to  something  too  fine,  to 
something  it  never  could  emulate.  The  Eliza- 
bethan lyrist  is  safe  among  lilies  and  cherries,  roses, 
pearls,  and  snow.  He  imdertakes  the  beautifiJ 
office  of  flattery,  and  flatters  with  courage.     There 


28  Children  in  Midwinter. 

is  no  hidden  reproach  in  the  praise.  Pearls  and 
snow  suffer,  in  a  sham  fight,  a  mimic  defeat  that 
does  them  no  harm,  and  no  harm  comes  to  the 
lady's  beauty  from  a  competition  so  impossible. 
She  never  wore  a  lily  or  a  coral  in  the  colours  of 
her  face,  and  their  beauty  is  not  hers.  But  here 
is  the  secret :  she  is  compared  with  a  flower  be- 
cause she  could  not  endure  to  be  compared  with  a 
child.  That  would  touch  her  too  nearly.  There 
would  be  the  human  texture  and  the  life  like  hers, 
but  immeasurably  more  lovely.  No  colour,  no 
surface,  no  eyes  of  woman  have  ever  been  com- 
parable with  the  colour,  the  surface,  and  the  eyes 
of  childhood.  And  no  poet  has  ever  run  the  risk 
of  such  a  defeat.  Why,  it  is  defeat  enough  for  a 
woman  to  have  her  face,  however  well-favoured, 
close  to  a  child's,  even  if  there  is  no  one  by  who 
should  be  rash  enough  to  approach  them  still  nearer 
by  a  comparison. 

This,  needless  to  say,  is  true  of  no  other  kind 
of  beauty  than  that  beauty  of  light,  colour,  and 
surface  to  which  the  Elizabethans  referred,  and 
which  suggested  their  flatteries  in  disfavour  of  the 
lily.  There  are,  indeed,  other  adult  beauties,  but 
those  are  such  as  make  no  allusions  to  the  garden. 
What  is  here  affirmed  is  that  the  beautiful  woman 
who  is  widely  and  wisely  likened  to  the  flowers, 
which  are  inaccessibly  more  beautifiil,  must  not. 


Children  in  Midwinter.  29 

for  her  own  sake,  be  likened  to  the  always  access- 
ible child. 

Besides  light  and  colour,  children  have  a  beauty 
of  finish  which  is  much  beyond  that  of  more 
finished  years.  This  gratuitous  addition,  this 
completeness,  is  one  of  their  unexpected  advant- 
ages. Their  beauty  of  finish  is  the  peculiarity  of 
their  first  childhood,  and  loses,  as  years  are  added, 
that  little  extra  character  and  that  surprise  of  per- 
fection. A  bloom  disappears,  for  instance.  In 
some  little  children  the  whole  face,  and  especially 
all  the  space  between  the  growth  of  the  eyebrows 
and  the  growth  of  the  hair,  is  covered  with  hardly 
perceptible  down  as  soft  as  bloom.  Look  then  at 
the  eyebrows  themselves.  Their  line  is  as  definite 
as  in  later  life,  but  there  is  in  the  child  the  finish 
given  by  the  exceeding  fineness  of  the  delicate 
hairs.  Moreover,  what  becomes,  afterwards,  of 
the  length  and  the  curl  of  the  eyelash  ?  What  is 
there  in  growing  up  that  is  destructive  of  a  finish 
so  charming  as  this  ? 

Queen  Elizabeth  forbade  any  light  to  visit  her 
face  **fi"om  the  right  or  from  the  left"  when  her 
portrait  was  a-painting.  She  was  an  observant 
woman,  and  liked  to  be  lighted  from  the  fi-ont. 
It  is  a  light  from  the  right  or  from  the  left  that 
marks  an  elderly  face  with  minute  shadows.  And 
you  must  place  a  child  in  such  a  light,  in  order  to 


3©  Children  in  Midwinter. 

see  the  finishing  and  parting  caress  that  infancy  has 
given  to  his  face.  The  down  will  then  be  found 
even  on  the  thinnest  and  clearest  skin  of  the  middle 
red  of  his  cheek.  His  hair,  too,  is  imponderably 
fine,  and  his  nails  are  not  much  harder  than  petals. 

To  return  to  the  child  in  January.  It  is  his 
month  for  the  laying  up  of  dreams.  No  one  can 
tell  whether  it  is  so  with  all  children,  or  even  with 
a  majority  ;  but  with  some  children,  of  passionate 
fancy,  there  occurs  now  and  then  a  children's 
dance,  or  a  party  of  any  kind,  which  has  a  charm 
and  glory  mingled  with  uncertain  dreams.  Never 
forgotten,  and  yet  never  certainly  remembered  as  a 
fact  of  this  hfe,  is  such  an  evening.  When  many 
and  many  a  later  pleasure,  about  the  reality  of 
which  there  never  was  any  kind  of  doubt,  has 
been  long  forgotten,  that  evening — as  to  which  all 
is  doubt — ^is  impossible  to  forget.  In  a  few  years 
it  has  become  so  remote  that  the  history  of  Greece 
derives  antiquity  from  it.  In  later  years  it  is  still 
doubtful,  still  a  legend. 

The  child  never  asked  how  much  was  fact.  It 
was  always  so  immeasurably  long  ago  that  the 
sweet  party  happened — ^if  indeed  it  happened.  It 
had  so  long  taken  its  place  in  that  past  wherein 
lurks  all  the  antiquity  of  the  world.  No  one 
would  know,  no  one  could  tell  him,  precisely 
what  occurred.     And  who  can  know  whether — if 


Children  in  Midwinter.  31 

it  be  indeed  a  dream — he  has  dreamt  it  often,  or 
has  dreamt  once  that  he  had  dreamt  it  often  ? 
That  dubious  night  is  entangled  in  repeated  visions 
during  the  lonely  Hfe  a  child  lives  in  sleep ;  it  is 
intricate  with  illusions.  It  becomes  the  most 
mysterious  and  the  least  worldly  of  all  memories,  a 
spiritual  past.  The  word  pleasure  is  too  trivial  ftir 
such  a  remembrance.  A  midwinter  long  gone  by 
contained  the  suggestion  of  such  dreams ;  and 
the  midwinter  of  this  year  must  doubtless  be  pre- 
paring for  the  heart  of  many  an  ardent  young  child 
a  like  legend  and  a  like  antiquity.  For  the  old  it 
is  a  mere  present. 


THAT  PRETTY  PERSON. 


/ 


THAT  PRETTY  PERSON. 


URING  the  many  years  in  which 
"evolution"  was  the  favourite 
word,  one  significant  lesson — so 
it  seems — was  learnt,  which  has 
outlived  controversy,  and  has 
remained  longer  than  the  questions  at  issue — an 
interesting  and  unnoticed  thing  cast  up  by  the 
storm  of  thoughts.  This  is  a  disposition,  a  general 
consent,  to  find  the  use  and  the  value  of  process, 
and  even  to  understand  a  kind  of  repose  in  the 
very  wayfaring  of  progress.  With  this  is  a 
resignation  to  change,  and  something  more  than 
resignation — a  delight  in  those  qualities  that  could 
not  be  but  for  their  transitoriness. 

What,  then,  is  this  but  the  admiration,  at  last 
confessed  by  the  world,  for  childhood?  Time 
was  when  childhood  was  but  borne  with,  and  that 
for  the  sake  of  its  mere  promise  of  manhood.  We 
do  not  now  hold,  perhaps,  that  promise  so  high. 
Even,  nevertheless,  if  we  held  it  high,  we  should 
acknowledge  the  approach  to  be  a  state  adorned 
with  its  own  conditions. 


36  That  Pretty  Person. 

But  it  was  not  so  once.  As  the  primitive  lullaby 
is  nothing  but  a  patient  prophecy  (the  mother's), 
so  was  education,  some  two  hundred  years  ago, 
nothing  but  an  impatient  prophecy  (the  father's) 
of  the  full  stature  of  body  and  mind.  The  Indian 
woman  sings  of  the  future  hunting.  If  her  song  is 
not  restless,  it  is  because  she  has  a  sense  of  the 
results  of  time,  and  has  submitted  her  heart  to 
experience.  Childhood  is  a  time  of  danger; 
"Would  it  were  done."  But,  meanwhile,  the 
right  thing  is  to  put  it  to  sleep  and  guard  its 
slumbers.  It  will  pass.  She  sings  prophecies  to 
the  child  of  his  hunting,  as  she  sings  a  song  about 
the  robe  while  she  spins,  and  a  song  about  bread 
as  she  grinds  corn.      She  bids  good  speed. 

John  Evelyn  was  equally  eager,  and  not  so 
submissive.  His  child — **that  pretty  person"  in 
Jeremy  Taylor's  letter  ot  condolence — was  chiefly 
precious  to  him  inasmuch  as  he  was,  too  soon,  a 
likeness  of  the  man  he  never  lived  to  be.  The 
father,  writing  with  tears  when  the  boy  was  dead, 
says  of  him:  "At  two  and  a  half  years  of  age  he 
pronounced  English,  Latin,  and  French  exactly, 
and  could  perfectly  read  in  these  three  languages." 
As  he  lived  precisely  five  years,  all  he  did  was  done 
at  that  little  age,  and  it  comprised  this:  **He  got 
by  heart  almost  the  entire  vocabulary  of  Latin  and 
French  primitives  and  words,  could  make  congruous 


That    Pretty  Person.  37 

syntax,  turn  English  into  Latin,  and  vice  versa, 
construe  and  prove  what  he  read,  and  did  the 
government  and  use  of  relatives,  verbs,  substantives, 
ellipses,  and  many  figures  and  tropes,  and  made  a 
considerable  progress  in  Comenius's  *Janua,'  and 
had  a  strong  passion  for  Greek." 

Grant  that  this  may  be  a  little  abated,  because 
a  very  serious  man  is  not  to  be  too  much  believed 
w^hen  he  is  describing  what  he  admires  ;  it  is  the 
very  fact  of  his  admiration  that  is  so  curious  a  sign 
of  those  hasty  times.  All  being  favorable,  the 
child  of  Evelyn's  studious  home  would  have  done 
all  these  things  in  the  course  of  nature  within  a 
few  years.  It  was  the  fact  that  he  did  them  out 
of  the  course  of  nature  that  was,  to  Evelyn,  so 
exquisite.  The  course  of  nature  had  not  any 
beauty  in  his  eyes.  It  might  be  borne  with  for  the 
sake  of  the  end,  but  it  was  not  admired  for  the 
majesty  of  its  unhasting  process.  Jeremy  Taylor 
mourns  with  him  "the  strangely  hopeful  child," 
who — without  Comenius's  "Janua"  and  without 
congruous  syntax — was  fulfilling,  had  they  known 
it,  an  appropriate  hope,  answering  a  distinctive 
prophecy,  and  crowning  and  closing  a  separate 
expectation  every  day  of  his  five  years. 

Ah!  the  word  "hopeful  "  seems,  to  us,  in  this 
day,  a  word  too  flattering  to  the  estate  of  man. 
They  thought    their   little    boy   strangely   hopeful 


38  That   Pretty  Person. 

because  he  was  so  quick  on  his  way  to  be  some- 
thing else.  They  lost  the  timely  perfection  the  while 
they  were  so  intent  upon  their  hopes.  And  yet  it 
is  our  own  modern  age  that  is  charged  with  haste! 

It  would  seem  rather  as  though  the  world, 
whatever  it  shall  unlearn,  must  rightly  learn  to 
confess  the  passing  and  irrevocable  hour;  not 
slighting  it,  or  bidding  it  hasten  its  work,  nor  yet 
hailing  it,  with  Faust,  **  Stay,  thou  art  so  fair!" 
Childhood  is  but  change  made  gay  and  visible,  and 
the  world  has  lately  been  converted  to  change. 

Our  fathers  valued  change  for  the  sake  of  its  re- 
sults ;  we  value  it  in  the  act.  To  us  the  change  is 
revealed  as  perpetual ;  every  passage  is  a  goal,  and 
every  goal  a  passage.  The  hours  are  equal ;  but 
some  of  them  wear  apparent  wings. 

Tout  passe.  Is  the  fruit  for  the  flower,  or  the 
flower  for  the  fruit,  or  the  fruit  for  the  seeds  which 
it  is  formed  to  shelter  and  contain?  It  seems  as 
though  our  forefathers  had  answered  this  question 
most  arbitrarily  as  to  the  life  of  man. 

All  their  literature  dealing  with  children  is  bent 
upon  this  haste,  this  suppression  of  the  approach  to 
what  seemed  then  the  only  time  of  fulfilment. 
The  way  was  without  rest  to  them.  And  this 
because  they  had  the  illusion  of  a  rest  to  be  gained 
at  some  later  point  of  this  unpausing  life. 

Evelyn  and  his  contemporaries  dropped  the  very 


That  Pretty  Person.  39 

word  child  as  soon  as  might  be,  if  not  sooner. 
When  a  poor  little  boy  came  to  be  eight  years  old 
they  called  him  a  youth.  The  diarist  himself  had 
no  cause  to  be  proud  of  his  own  early  years,  for  he 
was  so  far  indulged  in  idleness  by  an  "honoured 
grandmother  "  that  he  was  *'  not  initiated  into  any 
rudiments"  till  he  was  four  years  of  age.  He 
seems  even  to  have  been  a  youth  of  eight  before 
Latin  was  seriously  begun  ;  but  this  fact  he  is 
evidently,  in  after  years,  with  a  total  lack  of  a  sense 
of  humour,  rather  ashamed  of,  and  hardly  acknowl- 
edges. It  is  difficult  to  imagine  what  childhood 
must  have  been  when  nobody,  looking  on,  saw  any 
fun  in  it ;  when  everything  that  was  proper  to  five 
years  old  was  defect.  A  strange  good  conceit  of 
themselves  and  of  their  own  ages  had  those  fathers. 
They  took  their  children  seriously,  without 
relief.  Evelyn  has  nothing  to  say  about  his  little 
ones  that  has  a  sign  of  a  smile  in  it.  Twice  are 
children,  not  his  own,  mentioned  in  his  diary. 
Once  he  goes  to  the  wedding  of  a  maid  of  five  years 
old — a  curious  thing,  but  not,  evidently,  an  occasion 
of  sensibility.  Another  time  he  stands  by,  in  a 
French  hospital,  while  a  youth  of  less  than  nine 
years  of  age  undergoes  a  fi-ightfiil  surgical  operation 
"with  extraordinary  patience."  "The  use  I 
made  of  it  was  to  give  Almighty  God  hearty 
thanks  that  I  had  not  been  subject  to  this  deplorable 


4©  That  Pretty  Person. 

this  deplorable  infirmitie."     This  is  what  he  says. 

See,  moreover,  how  the  fashion  of  hurrying  child- 
hood prevailed  in  literature,  and  how  it  abolished 
little  girls.  It  may  be  that  there  were  in  all  ages 
— even  those — certain  few  boys  who  insisted  upon 
being  children  ;  whereas  the  girls  were  docile  to 
the  adult  ideal.  Art,  for  example,  had  no  little 
girls.  There  was  always  Cupid,  and  there  were 
the  prosperous  urchin-angels  of  the  painters  ;  the 
one  who  is  hauling  up  his  little  brother  by  the  hand 
in  the  **  Last  Communion  of  St.  Jerome"  might 
be  called  Tommy.  But  there  were  no  "  httle 
radiant  girls."  Now  and  then  an  **  Education  of 
the  Virgin  ' '  is  the  exception,  and  then  it  is  always 
a  matter  of  sewing  and  reading.  As  for  the  little 
girl  saints,  even  when  they  were  so  young  that 
their  hands,  like  those  of  St.  Agnes,  slipped  through 
their  fetters,  they  are  always  recorded  as  reflising 
importunate  suitors,  which  seems  necessary  to  make 
them  interesting  to  the  mediaeval  mind,  but  mars 
them  for  ours. 

So  does  the  hurrying  and  ignoring  of  little-girl- 
childhood  somewhat  hamper  the  delight  with  which 
readers  of  John  Evelyn  admire  his  most  admirable 
Mrs.  Godolphin.  She  was  Maid  of  Honour  to  the 
Queen  in  the  Court  of  Charles  II.  She  was,  as 
he  prettily  says,  an  Arethusa  "who  passed  through 
all  those  turbulent  waters  without  so  much  as  the 


That  Pretty  Person.  41 

least  stain  or  tincture  in  her  christall."  She  held 
her  state  with  men  and  maids  for  her  servants, 
guided  herself  by  most  exact  rules,  such  as  that  of 
never  speaking  to  the  King,  gave  an  excellent 
example  and  instruction  to  the  other  maids  of 
honour,  w^as  "severely  carefial  how  she  might  give 
the  least  countenance  to  that  liberty  which  the 
gallants  there  did  usually  assume,"  refused  the 
addresses  of  the  ** greatest  persons,"  and  was  as 
famous  for  her  beauty  as  for  her  wit.  One  would 
like  to  forget  the  age  at  which  she  did  these  things. 
When  she  began  her  service  she  was  eleven. 
When  she  was  making  her  rule  never  to  speak  to 
the  King  she  was  not  thirteen. 

Marriage  was  the  business  of  daughters  of 
fourteen  and  fifteen,  and  heroines,  therefore,  were 
of  those  ages.  The  poets  turned  April  into  May, 
and  seemed  to  think  that  they  lent  a  grace  to  the 
year  if  they  shortened  and  abridged  the  spring  of 
their  many  songs.  The  particular  year  they  sang 
of  was  to  be  a  particularly  fine  year,  as  who  should 
say  a  fine  child  and  forward,  with  congruous  syn- 
tax at  two  years  old,  and  ellipses,  figures,  and 
tropes.  Even  as  late  as  Keats  a  poet  would  not 
have  patience  with  the  process  of  the  seasons,  but 
boasted  of  untimely  flowers.  The  "musk-rose" 
is  never  in  fact  the  child  of  mid-May,  as  he  has  it. 

The  young  women  of  Addison  are  nearly  four- 


42  That  Pretty   Person. 

teen  years  old.  His  fear  of  losing  the  idea  of  the 
bloom  of  their  youth  makes  him  so  tamper  with 
the  bloom  of  their  childhood.  The  young  heiress 
of  seventeen  in  the  Spectator  has  looked  upon  her- 
self as  marriageable  "  for  the  last  six  years."  The 
famous  letter  describing  the  figure,  the  dance,  the 
wit,  the  stockings  of  the  charming  Mr.  Shapely  is 
supposed  to  be  written  by  a  girl  of  thirteen,  "  will- 
ing to  settle  in  the  world  as  soon  as  she  can."  She 
adds,  **I  have  a  good  portion  which  they  cannot 
hinder  me  of."  This  correspondent  is  one  of 
**  the  women  who  seldom  ask  advice  before  they 
have  bought  their  wedding  clothes."  There  was 
no  sense  of  childhood  in  an  age  that  could  think 
this  an  opportune  pleasantry. 

But  impatience  of  the  way  and  the  wayfaring 
was  to  disappear  from  a  later  century — an  age  that 
has  found  all  things  to  be  on  a  journey,  and  all 
things  complete  in  their  day  because  it  is  their 
day,  and  has  its  appointed  end.  It  is  the  tardy 
conviction  of  this,  rather  than  a  sentiment  ready 
made,  that  has  caused  the  childhood  of  children  to 
seem,  at  last,  something  else  than  a  defect. 


OUT  OF  TOWN. 


OUT  OF  TOWN. 


O  be  on  a  villeggiatura  with  the 
children  is  to  surprise  them  in 
ways  and  words  not  always  evi- 
dent in  the  London  house.  The 
narrow  lodgings  cause  you  to  hear 
and  overhear.  Nothing  is  more  curious  to  listen  to 
than  a  young  child's  dramatic  voice.  The  child, 
being  a  boy,  assumes  a  deep,  strong,  and  ultra- 
masculine  note,  and  a  swagger  in  his  walk,  and 
gives  himself  the  name  of  the  tallest  of  his  father's 
friends.  The  tone  is  not  only  manly  ;  it  is  a  tone 
of  affairs,  and  withal  careless  ;  it  is  intended  to 
suggest  business,  and  also  the  possession  of  a  top- 
hat  and  a  pipe,  and  is  known  in  the  family  of  the 
child  as  his  "official  voice."  One  day  it  be- 
came more  official  than  ever,  and  really  more  mas- 
culine than  life  ;  and  it  alternated  with  his  own 
tones  of  three  years  old.  In  these,  he  asked  with 
humility,  **  Will  you  let  me  go  to  heaven  if  I'm 
naughty?  Will  you?"  Then  he  gave  the  reply 
in  the  tone  of  affairs,  the  official  voice  at  its  very 


46  Out  of  Town. 

best:  **No,  little  boy,  I  won't!"  It  was  evi- 
dent that  the  infant  was  not  assuming  the  character 
of  his  father's  tallest  friend  this  time,  but  had  taken 
a  role  more  exalted.  His  little  sister  of  a  year 
older  seemed  thoroughly  to  enjoy  the  humour  of  the 
situation.  '*  Listen  to  him,  mother.  He's  trying 
to  talk  like  God.      He  often  does." 

Bulls  are  made  by  a  less  imaginative  child  who 
likes  to  find  some  reason  for  things — a  girl.  Out 
at  the  work  of  picking  blackberries,  she  explains, 
*' Those  rather  good  ones  were  all  bad,  mother,  so 
I  ate  them."  Being  afraid  of  dogs,  this  little  girl 
of  four  years  old  has  all  kinds  of  dodges  to  disguise 
her  fear,  which  she  has  evidendy  resolved  to  keep 
to  herself.  She  will  set  up  a  sudden  song  to  dis- 
tract attention  from  the  fact  that  she  is  placing  her- 
self out  of  the  dog's  way,  and  she  will  pretend  to 
turn  to  gather  a  flower,  while  she  watches  the 
creature  out  of  sight.  On  the  other  hand,  prud- 
ence in  regard  to  carts  and  bicycles  is  openly  dis- 
played, and  the  infants  are  zealous  to  warn  one 
another.  A  rider  and  his  horse  are  called  briefly 
"a  norseback." 

Children,  who  see  more  things  than  they  have 
names  for,  show  a  fine  courage  in  taking  any  words 
that  seem  likely  to  serve  them,  without  wasting 
time  in  asking  for  the  word  in  use.  This  enter- 
prise is  most  active  at  three  and  four  years,  when 


Out  of  Town.  47 

children  have  more  than  they  can  say.  So  a  child 
of  those  years  running  to  pick  up  horse-chestnuts, 
for  him  a  new  species,  calls  after  his  mother  a  fiill 
description  of  what  he  has  found,  naming  the  things 
indiiferently  *•  dough-nuts  "  and  **  cocoa-nuts." 
And  another,  having  an  anecdote  to  tell  concerning 
the  Thames  and  a  little  brook  that  joins  it  near  the 
house,  calls  the  first  the  **  front- sea"  and  the  sec- 
ond the  "back-sea."  There  is  no  intention  of 
taking  hberties  with  the  names  of  things — only  a 
cheerflil  resolve  to  go  on  in  spite  of  obstacles.  It 
is  such  a  spirit  of  liberty  as  most  of  us  have  felt 
when  we  have  dreamt  of  improvising  a  song  or 
improvising  a  dance.  The  child  improvises  with 
such  means  as  he  has. 

This  is,  of  course,  at  the  very  early  ages.  A 
little  later — at  eight  or  nine — there  is  a  very  clear- 
headed sense  of  the  value  of  words.  So  that  a 
little  girl  of  that  age,  told  that  she  may  buy  some 
fruit,  and  wishing  to  know  her  limits  in  spending, 
asks,  "What  mustn't  it  be  more  than?"  For  a 
child,  who  has  not  the  word  ** maximum"  at 
hand,  nothing  could  be  more  precise  and  concise. 
Still  later,  there  is  a  sweet  brevity  that  looks  almost 
like  conscious  expression,  as  when  a  boy  writes 
from  his  first  boarding  school:  **  Whenever  I  can't 
stop  laughing  I  have  only  to  think  of  home." 


48  Out  of  Town. 

Infinitely  different  as  children  are,  they  differ  in 
nothing  more  than  in  the  degree  of  generosity. 
The  most  sensitive  of  children  is  a  little  gay  girl 
whose  feelings  are  hurt  with  the  greatest  facility, 
and  who  seems,  indeed,  to  have  the  susceptibility  of 
other  ages  as  well  as  of  her  own — for  instance,  she 
cannot  endure  without  a  flush  of  pain  to  hear 
herself  called  fat.  But  she  always  brings  her  little 
wound  to  him  who  has  wounded  her.  The  first 
confidant  she  seeks  is  the  offender.  If  you  have 
laughed  at  her  she  will  not  hide  her  tears  elsewhere 
than  on  your  shoulder.  She  confesses  by  her 
exquisite  action  at  one  her  poor  vanity  and  her 
humility. 

The  worst  of  children  in  the  country  is  their 
inveterate  impulse  to  use  death  as  their  toy.  Im- 
mediately on  their  discovery  of  some  pretty  insect, 
one  tender  child  calls  to  the  other  "  Dead  it." 

Children  do  not  look  at  the  sky  unless  it  is  sug- 
gested to  them  to  do  so.  When  the  sun  dips  to 
the  narrow  horizon  of  their  stature,  and  comes  to 
the  level  of  their  eyes,  even  then  they  are  not 
greatly  interested.  Enormous  clouds,  erect,  with 
the  sun  behind,  do  not  gain  their  eyes.  What  is 
of  annual  interest  is  the  dark.  Having  fallen  asleep 
all  the  summer  by  daylight,  and  having  awakened 
after  sunrise,  children  find  a  stimulus  of  fim  and 


Otrr  OF  Town.  49 

fear  in  the  autumn  darkness  outside  the  windows. 
There  is  a  frolic  with  the  unknown  blackness,  with 
the  reflections,  and  with  the  country  night. 


EXPRESSION. 


^ 


EXPRESSION. 

JTRANGE  to  say,  the  eyes  of  chil- 
dren, whose  minds  are  so  small, 
express  intelligence  better  than  do 
the  greater  number  of  adult  eyes. 
David  Garrick's  were  evidently 
unpreoccupied,  like  theirs.  The  look  of  intelligence 
is  outward — frankly  directed  upon  external  things  ; 
it  is  observant,  and  therefore  mobile  without  inner 
restlessness.  For  restless  eyes  are  the  least  observ- 
ant of  all — they  move  by  a  kind  of  distraction. 
The  looks  of  observant  eyes,  moving  with  the  liv- 
ing things  they  keep  in  sight,  have  many  pauses  as 
well  as  flights.  This  is  the  action  of  intelligence, 
whereas  the  eyes  of  intellect  are  detained  or  dark- 
ened. 

Rational  perception,  with  all  its  phases  of  hu- 
mour, are  best  expressed  by  a  child,  who  has  few 
second  thoughts  to  divide  the  image  of  his  moment- 
ary feeling.  His  simplicity  adds  much  to  the  mani- 
festation of  his  intelligence.  The  child  is  the  last 
and  lowest  of  rational   creatures,   for  in  him  the 


54  Expression. 

"rational  soul"  closes  its  long  downward  flight 
with  the  bright  final  revelation. 

He  has  also  the  chief  beauty  of  the  irrational  soul 
— of  the  mind,  that  is,  of  the  lower  animal — ^which 
is  singleness.  The  simplicity,  the  integrity,  the 
one  thing  at  a  time,  of  a  good  animal's  eyes  is  a 
great  beauty,  and  is  apt  to  cause  us  to  exaggerate 
our  sense  of  their  expressiveness.  An  animal's 
eyes,  at  their  best,  are  very  slightly  expressive ; 
languor  or  alertness,  the  quick  expectation,  even 
the  aloofness  of  doubt  they  are  able  to  show,  but 
the  showing  is  mechanical ;  the  human  sentiment 
of  the  spectator  adds  the  rest. 

All  this  simplicity  the  child  has,  at  moments, 
with  the  divisions  and  delicacies  of  the  rational  soul, 
also.  His  looks  express  the  first,  the  last,  and  the 
clearest  humanity.  He  is  the  first  by  his  youth 
and  the  last  by  his  lowliness.  He  is  the  beginning 
and  the  result  of  the  creation  of  man. 


UNDER  THE  EARLY  STARS. 


^ 


UNDER  THE  EARLY  STARS. 

I  LAY  is  not  for  every  hour  of  the 
day,  or  for  any  hour  taken  at 
random.  There  is  a  tide  in  the 
affairs  of  children.  Civilization 
is  cruel  in  sending  them  to  bed  at 
the  most  stimulating  time  of  dusk.  Summer  dusk, 
especially,  is  the  frolic  moment  for  children,  baffle 
them  how  you  may.  They  may  have  been  in  a 
pottering  mood  all  day,  intent  upon  all  kinds  of 
close  industries,  breathing  hard  over  choppings  and 
poundings.  But  when  late  twilight  comes,  there 
comes  also  the  punctual  wildness.  The  children 
will  run  and  pursue,  and  laugh  for  the  mere  move- 
ment— it  does  so  jog  their  spirits. 

What  remembrances  does  this  imply  of  the 
hunt,  what  of  the  predatory  dark  ?  The  kitten 
grows  alert  at  the  same  hour,  and  hunts  for  moths 
and  crickets  in  the  grass.  It  comes  like  an  imp, 
leaping  on  all  fours.  The  children  lie  in  ambush 
and  fall  upon  one  another  in  the  mimicry  of  hunting. 
The  sudden  outbreak  of  action  is  complained  of 


58  Under  the  Early  Stars. 

as  a  defiance  and  a  rebellion.  Their  entertainers 
are  tired,  and  the  children  are  to  go  home.  But, 
with  more  or  less  of  life  and  fire,  they  strike  some 
blow  for  liberty.  It  may  be  the  impotent  revolt 
of  the  ineffectual  child,  or  the  stroke  of  the  con- 
querer ;  but  something,  something  is  done  for 
freedom  under  the  early  stars. 

This  is  not  the  only  time  when  the  energy  of 
children  is  in  conflict  with  the  weariness  of  men. 
But  it  is  less  tolerable  that  the  energy  of  men 
should  be  at  odds  with  the  weariness  of  children, 
which  happens  at  some  time  of  their  jaunts  to- 
gether, especially,  alas  !  in  the  jaunts  of  the  poor. 

Of  games  for  the  summer  dusk  when  it  rains, 
cards  are  most  beloved  by  children.  Three  tiny 
girls  were  to  be  taught  "  old  maid  "  to  beguile  the 
time.  One  of  them,  a  nut-brown  child  of  five, 
was  persuading  another  to  play.  "Oh  come," 
she  said,  "and  play  with  me  at  new  maid." 

The  time  of  falling  asleep  is  a  child's  immemorial 
and  incalculable  hour.  It  is  fiiU  of  traditions,  and 
beset  by  antique  habits.  The  habit  of  prehistoric 
races  has  been  cited  as  the  only  explanation  of  the 
fixity  of  some  customs  in  mankind.  But  if  the  en- 
quirers who  appeal  to  that  beginning  remembered 
better  their  own  infancy,  they  would  seek  no 
further.  See  the  habits  in  falling  to  sleep  which 
have  children  in  their  thralldom.      Try  to  over- 


Under  the  Early  Stars.  59 

come  them  in  any  child,  and  his  own  conviction  of 
their  high  antiquity  weakens  your  hand. 

Childhood  is  antiquity,  and  with  the  sense  of 
time  and  the  sense  of  mystery  is  connected  for  ever 
the  hearing  of  a  lullaby.  The  French  sleep-song 
is  the  most  romantic.  There  is  in  it  such  a  sound 
of  history  as  must  inspire  any  imaginative  child, 
falling  to  sleep,  with  a  sense  of  the  incalculable ; 
and  the  songs  themselves  are  old.  Le  Bon  Roi 
Dagobert  has  been  sung  over  French  cradles  since 
the  legend  was  fresh.  The  nurse  knows  nothing 
more  sleepy  than  the  tune  and  the  verse  that  she 
herself  slept  to  when  a  child.  The  gaiety  of  the 
thirteenth  century,  in  Le  Pont  (T  Avignon,  is  put 
mysteriously  to  sleep,  away  in  the  tete  a  tete  of 
child  and  nurse,  in  a  thousand  littie  sequestered 
rooms  at  night.  Malbrook  would  be  comparatively 
modern,  were  not  all  things  that  are  sung  to  a 
drowsing  child  as  distant  as  the  day  of  Abraham. 

If  English  children  are  not  rocked  to  many  such 
aged  lullabies,  some  of  them  are  put  to  sleep  to 
strange  cradle-songs.  The  affectionate  races  that 
are  brought  into  subjection  sing  the  primitive 
lullaby  to  the  white  child.  Asiatic  voices  and 
African  persuade  him  to  sleep  in  the  tropical  night. 
His  closing  eyes  are  filled  with  alien  images. 


THE  MAN  WITH  TWO 
HEADS. 


f 


THE  MAN  WITH  TWO 
HEADS. 

JT  is  generally  understood  in  the 
family  that  the  nurse  who  menaces 
a  child,  whether  with  the  super- 
natural or  with  simple  sweeps, 
lions,  or  tigers — goes.  The  rule  is 
a  right  one,  for  the  appeal  to  fear  may  possibly 
hurt  a  child ;  nevertheless,  it  oftener  fails  to  hurt 
him.  If  he  is  prone  to  fears,  he  will  be  helpless 
under  their  grasp,  without  the  help  of  human  tales. 
The  night  will  threaten  him,  the  shadow  will  pur- 
sue, the  dream  will  catch  him  ;  terror  itself  have 
him  by  the  hean.  And  terror,  having  made  his 
pulses  leap,  knows  how  to  use  any  thought,  any 
shape,  any  image,  to  account  to  the  child's  mind 
for  the  flight  and  tempest  of  his  blood.  "The  child 
shall  not  be  frightened,"  decrees  ineffectual  love  ; 
but  though  no  man  make  him  afraid,  he  is  fright- 
ened. Fear  knows  him  well  and  finds  him  alone. 
Such  a  child  is  hardly  at  the  mercy  of  any  hu- 
man rashness  and  impatience;  nor  is  the  child  whose 


64  The  Man  with  Two  Heads. 

pulses  go  steadily,  and  whose  brows  are  fresh  and 
cool,  at  their  mercy.  This  is  one  of  the  points 
upon  which  a  healthy  child  resembles  the  Japanese. 
Whatever  that  extreme  Oriental  may  be  in  war  and 
diplomacy,  whatever  he  may  be  at  London  Uni- 
versity, or  whatever  his  plans  of  Empire,  in  relation 
to  the  unseen  world  he  is  a  child  at  play.  He 
hides  himself^  he  hides  his  eyes  and  pretends  to  be- 
heve  that  he  is  hiding,  he  runs  from  the  supernat- 
ural and  laughs  for  the  fan  of  running. 

So  did  a  child,  threatened  for  his  unruliness  with 
the  revelation  of  the  man  with  two  heads.  The 
nurse  must  have  had  recourse  to  this  man  under 
acute  provocation.  The  boy,  who  had  profited 
well  by  every  one  of  his  four  long  years,  and  was 
radiant  with  the  hght  and  colour  of  health,  refused 
to  be  left  to  compose  himself  to  sleep.  That  act  is 
an  adult  act,  learnt  in  the  self-conscious  and  deliber- 
ate years  of  later  Ufe,  when  man  goes  on  a  mental 
journey  in  search  of  rest,  aware  of  setting  forth. 
But  the  child  is  pursued  and  overtaken  by  sleep, 
caught,  surprised,  and  overcome.  He  goes  no 
more  to  sleep,  than  he  takes  a  **  constitutional " 
with  his  hoop  and  hoopstick.  The  child  amuses 
himself  up  to  the  last  of  his  waking  moments. 
Happily,  in  the  search  for  amusement,  he  is  apt  to 
learn  some  habit  or  to  cherish  some  toy,  either  of 
which  may  betray  him  and  deliver  him  up  to  sleep. 


The  Man  with  Two  Heads.  65 

the  enemy.  What  wonder,  then,  if  a  child  who 
knows  that  everyone  in  the  world  desires  his  peace 
and  pleasure,  should  clamour  for  companionship  in 
the  first  reluctant  minutes  of  bed  ?  This  child,  be- 
ing happy,  did  not  weep  for  what  he  wanted  ;  he 
shouted  for  it,  in  the  rousing  tones  of  his  strength. 
After  many  evenings  of  this  he  was  told  that  this 
was  precisely  the  vociferous  kind  of  wakefulness 
that  might  cause  the  man  with  two  heads  to  show 
himself. 

Unable  to  explain  that  no  child  ever  goes  to  sleep, 
but  that  sleep,  on  the  contrary,  "goes"  for  a 
child,  the  little  boy  yet  accepted  the  penalty,  be- 
lieved in  the  man,  and  kept  quiet  for  a  time. 

There  was  indignation  in  the  mother's  heart 
when  the  child  instructed  her  as  to  what  might  be 
looked  for  at  his  bedside  ;  she  used  all  her  emphasis 
in  assuring  him  that  no  man  with  two  heads  would 
ever  trouble  those  innocent  eyes,  for  there  was  no 
such  portent  anywhere  on  earth.  There  is  no  such 
heart-oppressing  task  as  the  making  of  these  assur- 
ances to  a  child,  for  whom  who  knows  what  por- 
tents are  actually  in  wait!  She  found  him,  however, 
cowering  with  laughter,  not  with  dread,  lest  the 
man  with  two  heads  should  see  or  overhear.  The 
man  with  two  heads  had  become  his  play,  and  so 
was  perhaps  bringing  about  his  sleep  by  gentler  means 
than  the  nurse  had  intended.    The  man  was  employ- 


66  The  Man  with  Two  Heads. 

ing  the  vacant  minutes  of  the  little  creature's  flight 
from  sleep,  called  ** going  to  sleep"  in  the  inexact 
language  of  the  old. 

Nor  would  the  boy  give  up  his  faith  with  its 
tremor  and  private  laughter.  Because  a  child  has 
a  place  for  everything,  this  boy  had  placed  the 
monstrous  man  in  the  ceihng,  in  a  corner  of  the 
room  that  might  be  kept  out  of  sight  by  the  bed 
curtain.  If  that  corner  were  left  uncovered,  the 
fear  would  grow  stronger  than  the  fun  ;  "the  man 
would  see  me,"  said  the  little  boy.  But  let  the 
curtain  be  in  position,  and  the  child  lay  alone,  hug- 
ging the  dear  belief  that  the  monster  was  near. 

He  was  earnest  in  controversy  with  his  mother 
as  to  the  existence  of  his  man.  The  man  was 
there,  for  he  had  been  told  so,  and  he  was  there 
to  wait  for  * 'naughty  boys,"  said  the  child,  with 
cheerful  self-condemnation.  The  little  boy's  voice 
was  somewhat  hushed,  because  of  the  four  ears  of 
the  listener,  but  it  did  not  falter,  except  when  his 
mother's  arguments  against  the  existence  of  the  man 
seemed  to  him  cogent  and  hkely  to  gain  the  day. 
Then  for  the  first  time  the  boy  was  a  little  down- 
cast, and  the  light  of  mystery  became  dinmier  in 
his  gay  eyes. 


CHILDREN  IN  BURLESQUE. 


1 


CHILDREN  IN  BURLESQUE. 


ERISION,  which  is  so  great  a  part  of 
human  comedy,  has  not  spared  the 
humours  of  children.  Yet  they 
are  fitter  subjects  for  any  other 
kind  of  jesting.  In  the  first  place 
they  are  quite  defenceless,  but  besides  and  before 
this,  it  might  have  been  supposed  that  nothing  in  a 
child  could  provoke  the  equal  passion  of  scorn. 
Between  confessed  unequals  scorn  is  not  even  sug- 
gested. Its  derisive  proclamation  of  inequality  has 
no  sting  and  no  meaning  where  inequality  is  natural 
and  manifest. 

Children  rouse  the  laughter  of  men  and  women  ; 
but  in  all  that  laughter  the  tone  of  derision  is  more 
strange  a  discord  than  the  tone  of  anger  would  be, 
or  the  tone  of  theological  anger  and  menace. 
These,  little  children  have  had  to  bear  in  their  day, 
but  in  the  grim  and  serious  moods — not  in  the  play 
— of  their  elders.  The  wonder  is  that  children 
should  ever  have  been  burlesqued,  or  held  to  be  fit 
subjects  for  irony. 


70  Children  in  Burlesque. 

Whether  the  thing  has  been  done  anywhere  out 
of  England,  in  any  form,  might  be  a  point  for  en- 
quiry. It  would  seem,  at  a  glance,  that  English 
art  and  literature  are  quiet  alone  in  this  incredible 
manner  of  sport. 

And  even  here,  too,  the  thing  that  is  laughed  at 
in  a  child  is  probably  always  a  mere  reflection  of 
the  parents*  vulgarity.  None  the  less  is  it  an  un- 
intelligible thing  that  even  the  rankest  vulgarity  of 
tather  or  mother  should  be  resented,  in  the  child, 
with  the  implacable  resentment  of  derision. 

John  Leech  used  the  caricature  of  a  baby  for  the 
purpose  of  a  scorn  that  was  not  angry,  but  famil- 
iar. It  is  true  that  the  poor  child  had  first  been 
burlesqued  by  tne  unchildish  aspect  imposed  upon 
him  by  his  dress,  which  presented  him,  without 
the  beauties  of  art  or  nature,  to  all  the  unnatural 
ironies.  Leech  did  but  finish  him  in  the  same 
spirit,  which  dots  for  the  childish  eyes,  and  a  certain 
form  of  face  which  is  bes  described  as  a  fat  square 
containing  two  circles — the  inordinate  cheeks  of 
that  ignominious  baby.  That  is  the  child  as  Punch 
in  Leech's  day  preserved  him,  the  latest  figure  of 
the  then  prevailing  domestic  raillery  of  the  do- 
mestic. 

In  like  manner  did  Thackeray  and  Dickens,  des- 
pite all  their  sentiment.  Children  were  made  to 
serve  both  the  sentiment  and   the  irony  between 


Children  in  Burlesque.  71 

which  those  two  writers,  alike  in  this,  stood  double- 
minded.  Thackeray,  writing  of  his  snobs,  wreaks 
himself  upon  a  child  ;  there  is  no  worse  snob  than 
his  snob-child.  There  are  snob-children  not  only 
in  the  book  dedicated  to  their  parents,  but  in  nearly 
all  his  novels.  There  is  a  female  snob-child  in 
"Lovel  the  Widower,"  who  may  be  taken  as  a 
type,  and  there  are  snob-children  at  frequent  inter- 
vals in  "  Philip."  It  is  not  certain  that  Thackeray 
intended  the  children  of  Pendennis  himself  to  be 
innocent  and  exempt. 

In  one  of  Dickens's  early  sketches  there  is  a 
plot  amongst  the  humorous  dramatis  persorne  to 
avenge  themselves  on  a  little  boy  for  the  lack  of 
tact  whereby  his  parents  have  brought  him  with 
them  to  a  party  on  the  river.  The  principal  humorist 
frightens  the  child  into  convulsions.  The  incident 
is  the  success  of  the  day,  and  is  obviously  intended 
to  have  some  kind  of  reflex  action  in  amusing  the 
reader.  In  Dickens's  maturer  books  the  burlesque 
httle  girl  imitates  her  mother's  illusory  fainting-fits. 

Our  glimpses  of  children  in  the  fugitive  pages  of 
that  day  are  grotesque.  A  httle  girl  in  Punch  im- 
proves on  the  talk  of  her  dowdy  mother  with  the 
maids.  An  inordinate  baby  stares  ;  a  little  boy 
fties,  hideous,  fi-om  some  hideous  terror. 


AUTHORSHIP. 


1 


AUTHORSHIP. 

UTHORSHIP  prevails  in  nur- 
series— at  least  in  some  nurseries. 
In  many  it  is  probably  a  fitful 
game,  and  since  the  days  of  the 
Brontes  there  has  not  been  a  large 
family  without  its  magazine.  The  weak  point  of 
all  this  literature  is  its  commonplace.  The  child's 
effort  is  to  write  something  as  much  like  as  possible 
to  the  tedious  books  that  are  read  to  him  ;  he  is 
apt  to  be  fluent  and  foolish.  If  a  child  simple 
enough  to  imitate  were  also  simple  enough  not  to 
imitate  he  might  write  nursery  magazines  that 
would  not  bore  us. 

As  it  is,  there  is  sometimes  nothing  but  the  fresh 
and  courageous  spelling  to  make  his  stories  go. 
**  He,"  however,  is  hardly  the  pronoun.  The 
girls  are  the  more  active  authors,  and  the  more 
prosaic.  What  they  would  write  had  they  never 
read  things  written  for  them  by  the  dull,  it  is  not 
possible  to  know.  What  they  do  write  is  this — 
to  take  a  passage  :      **  Poor  Mrs.  Bald  (that  was 


j^  Authorship. 

her  name)  thought  she  would  never  get  to  the 
wood  where  her  aunt  lived,  she  got  down  and 
pulled  the  donky  on  by  the  bridal.  .  .  .  Alas  ! 
her  troubles  were  not  over  yet,  the  donky  would 
not  go  where  she  wanted  it,  instead  of  turning 
down  Rose  Lane  it  went  down  another,  which  al- 
though Mrs.  Bald  did  not  know  it  led  to  a  very 
deep  and  dangerous  pond.  The  donky  ran  into 
the  pond  and  Mrs.  Bald  was  dround." 

To  give  a  prosperous  look  to  the  magazine  con- 
taining the  serial  story  just  quoted,  a  few  pages  of 
mixed  advertisements  are  laboriously  written  out : 
**  The  Imatation  of  Christ  is  the  best  book  in  all 
the  world."  **  Read  Thompson's  poetry  and  you 
are  in  a  world  of  delight."  **Barrat's  ginger 
beer  is  the  only  ginger  beer  to  drink."  **The 
place  for  a  ice."  Under  the  indefinite  heading 
*'A  Article,"  readers  are  told  **that  they  are 
liable  to  read  the  paper  for  nothing." 

A  still  younger  hand  contributes  a  short  story  in 
which  the  hero  returns  to  his  home  after  a  report 
of  his  death  had  been  believed  by  his  wife  and 
family.  The  last  sentence  is  worth  quoting : 
**  We  will  now,"  says  the  author,  **  leave  Mrs. 
White  and  her  two  children  to  enjoy  the  sudden 
appearance  of  Mr.  White." 

Here  is  an  editorial  announcement :  **  Ladies 
and  gentlemen,  every  week  at  the  end  of  the  paper 


Authorship.  77 

there  will  be  a  little  article  on  the  habits  of  the 
paper." 

On  the  whole,  authorship  does  not  seem  to 
foster  the  quality  of  imagination.  Convention, 
during  certain  early  years,  may  be  a  very  strong 
motive — not  so  much  with  children  brought  up 
strictly  within  its  limits,  perhaps,  as  with  those 
who  have  had  an  exceptional  freedom.  Against 
this,  as  a  kind  of  childish  bohemianism,  there  is, 
in  one  phase  of  childhood,  a  strong  reaction.  To 
one  child,  brought  up  internationally,  and  with 
somewhat  too  much  liberty  amongst  peasant  play- 
mates and  their  games,  in  many  dialects,  eagerness 
to  become  like  **  other  people,"  and  even  like  the 
other  people  of  quite  inferior  fiction,  grew  to  be 
almost  a  passion.  The  desire  was  in  time  out- 
grown, but  it  cost  the  girl  some  years  of  her  sim- 
phcity.      The  style  is  not  always  the  child. 


LETTERS 


LETTERS. 


HE  letter  exacted  from  a  child  is 
usually  a  letter  of  thanks ;  some- 
body has  sent  him  a  box  of  choco- 
lates. The  thanks  tend  to  stiffen 
a  child's  style  ;  but  in  any  case  a 
letter  is  the  occasion  of  a  sudden  self-consciousness, 
newer  to  a  child  than  his  elders  know.  They  speak 
prose,  and  know  it.  But  a  young  child  possesses 
his  words  by  a  different  tenure  ;  he  is  not  aware  of 
the  spelt  and  written  aspect  of  the  things  he  says 
every  day ;  he  does  not  dwell  upon  the  sound  of 
them.  He  is  so  little  taken  by  the  kind  and  char- 
acter of  any  word  that  he  catches  the  first  that 
comes  at  random.  A  little  child  to  whom  a  peach 
was  first  revealed,  whispered  to  his  mother,  "I 
like  that  kind  of  turnip."  Compelled  to  write  a 
letter,  the  child  finds  the  word  of  daily  life  suddenly 
a  stranger. 

The  fi-esher  the  mind  the  duller  the  sentence  ; 
and  the  younger  the  fingers  the  older,  more  wrink- 
led,   and  more    sidling    the    handwriting.      Dick- 


82  Letters. 

ens,  who  used  his  eyes,  remarked  the  contrast. 
The  hand  of  a  child  and  his  face  are  full  of  rounds  ; 
but  his  written  O  is  tottering  and  haggard. 

His  phrases  are  ceremonious  without  the  dignity 
of  ceremony.  The  child  chatters  because  he  wants 
his  companion  to  hear  ;  but  there  is  no  inspiration 
in  the  act  of  writing  to  a  distant  aunt  about  whom 
he  probably  has  some  grotesque  impression  because 
he  cannot  think  of  anyone,  however  vague  and 
forgotten,  without  a  mental  image.  As  like  as  not 
he  pictures  all  his  relatives  at  a  distance  with  their 
eyes  shut.  No  boy  wants  to  write  familiar  things 
to  a  forgotten  aunt  with  her  eyes  shut.  His 
thoughtless  elders  require  him  not  only  to  write  to 
her  under  these  discouragements,  but  to  write  to 
her  in  an  artless  and  childlike  fashion. 

The  child  is  unwieldy  of  thought,  besides.  He 
cannot  send  the  conventional  messages  but  he  loses 
his  way  among  the  few  pronouns  :  **  I  send  them 
their  love,"  **They  sent  me  my  love,"  "1  kissed 
their  hand  to  me."  If  he  is  stopped  and  told  to 
get  the  words  right,  he  has  to  make  a  long  effort. 
His  precedent  might  be  cited  to  excuse  every  poli- 
tician who  cannot  remember  whether  he  began  his 
sentence  with  "people"  in  the  singular  or  the 
plural,  and  who  finishes  it  otherwise  than  as  he  be- 
gan it.  Points  of  grammar  that  are  purely  points 
of  logic  baffle   a  child   completely.      He  is  as  un- 


Letters.  83 

ready  in  the  thought  needed  for  these  as  he  is  in 
the  use  of  his  senses. 

It  is  not  true — ^though  it  is  generally  said — ^that 
a  young  child's  senses  are  quick.  This  is  one  of 
the  unverified  ideas  that  commend  themselves,  one 
knows  not  why.  We  have  had  experiments  to 
compare  the  relative  quickness  of  perception  proved 
by  men  and  women.  The  same  experiments  with 
children  would  give  curious  results,  but  they  can 
hardly,  perhaps,  be  made,  because  the  children 
would  be  not  only  slow  to  perceive  but  slow  to 
announce  the  perception ;  so  the  moment  would 
go  by,  and  the  game  be  lost.  Not  even  amateur 
conjuring  does  so  baffle  the  slow  turning  of  a  child's 
mind  as  does  a  little  intricacy  of  grammar. 


THE  FIELDS. 


# 


THE  FIELDS. 


HE  pride  of  rustic  life  is  the  child's 
form  of  caste-feeling.  The  country 
child  is  the  aristocrat ;  he  has  des 
relations  suivies  with  game-keep- 
ers, nay,  with  the  most  interesting 
mole-catchers.  He  has  a  perfectly  self-conscious 
joy  that  he  is  not  in  a  square  or  a  suburb.  No 
essayist  has  so  much  feeling  against  terraces  and 
villas. 

As  for  imitation  country — the  further  suburb — ^it 
is  worse  than  town  ;  it  is  a  place  to  walk  in  ;  and 
the  tedium  of  a  walk  to  a  child's  mind  is  hardly 
measurable  by  a  man,  who  walks  voluntarily,  witn 
his  affairs  to  think  about,  and  his  eyes  released,  by 
age,  from  the  custom  of  perpetual  observation. 
The  child,  compelled  to  walk,  is  the  only  unresting 
observer  of  the  asphalt,  the  pavement,  the  garden 
gates  and  railings,  and  the  tedious  people.  He  is 
bored  as  he  will  never  be  bored  when  a  man. 

He  is  at  his  best  where,  under  the  welcome 
stress  and  pressure  of  abundant  crops,  he  is  ad- 


88  The  Fields. 

mitted  to  the  labours  of  men  and  women,  neither 
in  mere  play  nor  in  the  earnest  of  the  hop-field  for 
the  sake  of  his  little  gains.  On  the  steep  farm 
lands  of  the  Canton  de  Vaud,  where  maize  and 
grapes  are  carried  in  the  botte,  so  usually  are 
children  expected  in  the  field  that  bottes  are  made 
to  the  shape  of  a  back  and  arms  of  five  years 
old.  Some,  made  for  harvesters  of  those  years, 
can  hold  no  more  than  a  single  yellow  ear  of 
maize  or  two  handfijls  of  beans.  You  may  meet 
the  same  little  boy  with  the  repetitions  of  this 
load  a  score  of  times  in  a  morning.  Moreover 
the  Swiss  mother  has  always  a  fit  sense  of  what 
is  due  to  that  labourer.  When  the  plums  are  gather- 
ed, for  instance,  she  bakes  in  the  general  village  oven 
certain  round  open  tarts  across  which  her  arm  can 
hardly  reach.  No  plum  tarts  elsewhere  are  any- 
thing but  dull  in  comparison  with  these.  There  is, 
besides,  the  first  loaf  from  the  new  flour,  brown  from 
the  maize  and  white  from  the  wheat.  Nor  can  a 
day  of  potato-gathering  be  more  appropriately  end- 
ed than  with  a  little  fire  built  afield  and  the  baking 
of  some  of  the  harvest  under  the  wood  ashes.  Vint- 
aging  needs  no  praises,  nor  does  apple-gathering ; 
even  when  the  apples  are  for  cider,  they  are  never 
acrid  enough  to  baffle  a  child's  tooth. 

Yet  even  those  children  who  are  so  unlucky  as  never 
to  have   worked  in  a  real  field,   but  have  been 


The  Fields.  89 

compelled  to  vary  their  education  with  nothing  but 
play,  are  able  to  comfort  themselves  with  the  ir- 
regular harvest  of  the  hedges.  They  have  no 
little  hand  in  the  realities  of  cultivation,  but  wild 
growths  give  them  blackberries.  Pale  are  the  joys 
of  nutting  beside  those  of  haymaking,  but  at  least 
they  are  something. 

Harvests  apart.  Spring,  not  Autumn,  should 
make  a  childhood  of  memories  for  the  future.  In 
later  Autumn,  life  is  speeding  away,  ebbing,  taking 
flight,  a  fugitive,  taking  disguises,  hiding  in  the  dry 
seed,  retreating  into  the  dark.  The  daily  progress 
of  things  in  Spring  is  for  children,  who  look  close. 
They  know  the  way  of  moss  and  the  roots  of  ivy, 
they  breathe  the  breath  of  earth  immediately, 
direct.  They  have  a  sense  of  place,  of  persons, 
and  of  the  past  that  may  be  remembered  but  cannot 
be  recaptured.  Adult  accustomed  eyes  cannot  see 
what  a  child's  eye  sees  of  the  personality  of  a 
person  ;  to  the  child  the  accidents  of  voice  and 
look  are  charged  with  separate  and  unique  character. 
Such  a  sense  of  place  as  he  got  in  a  day  within 
some  forest,  or  in  a  week  by  some  lake,  so  that  a 
sound  or  odour  can  bring  it  back  in  after  days, 
with  a  shock — even  such  a  sense  of  single  person- 
ality does  a  little  watchfiil  girl  get  from  the  accents, 
the  turns  of  the  head,  the  habits  of  the  hands,  the 
presence  of  a  woman.      Not  all   places,    nor   all 


9©  The  Fields. 

persons,  are  so  quick  with  the  expression  of  them- 
selves ;  the  child  knows  the  difference.  As  for 
places  that  are  so  loaded,  and  that  breathe  so,  the 
child  discerns  them  passionately. 

A  travelled  child  multiplies  these  memories  and 
has  them  in  their  variety.  His  heart  has  room  for 
many  places  that  have  the  spirit  of  place.  The 
glacier  may  be  forgotten,  but  some  little  tract  of 
pasture  that  has  taken  wing  to  the  head  of  a 
mountain  valley,  a  field  that  has  soared  up  a  pass 
unnamed,  will  become  a  memory,  in  time,  sixty 
years  old.  That  is  a  fortunate  child  who  has 
tasted  country  life  in  places  far  apart,  who  has 
helped,  followed  the  wheat  to  the  threshing-floor 
of  a  Swiss  village,  stumbled  after  a  plough  of 
Virgil's  shape  in  remoter  Tuscan  hills,  and  gleaned 
after  a  vintage.  You  cannot  suggest  pleasanter 
memories  than  those  of  the  vintage,  for  the  day 
when  the  wine  will  be  old. 


THE  BARREN  SHORE. 


^ 


THE  BARREN  SHORE. 

>T  may  be  a  disappointment  to  the 
children  each  year  at  play  upon  so 
many  beaches — even  if  they  are 
but  dimly  aware  of  their  lack — to 
fand  their  annual  plaything  to  be 
not  a  real  annual ;  an  annual  thing,  indeed,  to  them, 
for  the  arbitrary  reason  that  they  go  down  to  it  once 
a  year,  but  not  annual  in  the  vital  and  natural  sense 
of  the  seasons,  not  waxing  and  waning,  not  bear- 
ing, not  turning  that  circle  of  the  seasons  whereof 
no  one  knows  which  is  the  highest  point  and  the 
secret  and  the  ultimate  purpose,  not  recreated,  not 
new,  and  not  yielding  to  the  child  anything  raw 
and  irregular  to  eat. 

Sand  castles  are  well  enough,  and  they  are  the 
very  commonplace  of  the  recollections  of  elders,  of 
their  rhetoric,  and  of  what  they  think  appropriate 
for  their  young  ones.  Shingle  and  sand  are  good 
playthings,  but  absolute  play  is  not  necessarily  the 
ideal  of  a  child  ;  he  would  rather  have  a  frolic  of 
work.      Of  all  the  early  autumn  things  to  be  done 


94  The  Barren  Shore. 

in  holiday  time,  that  game  with  the  beach  and  the 
wave  is  the  least  good  for  hohday-time. 

Not  that  the  shore  is  everywhere  so  barren.  The 
coast  of  the  Londoners — all  round  the  southern  and 
eastern  borders  of  England — is  indeed  the  dullest 
of  all  sea-margins.  But  away  in  the  gentle  bays 
of  Jersey  the  summer  grows  a  crop  of  seaweed  which 
the  long  ocean  wave  leaves  in  noble  curves  upon 
the  beach  ;  for  under  sunny  water  the  storms  have 
gathered  the  crops.  The  Channel  Island  people 
go  gleaning  after  the  sea,  and  store  the  seaweed  for 
their  fields.  Thus  the  beaches  of  Jersey  bays  are 
not  altogether  barren,  and  have  a  kind  of  dead  and 
accessory  harvest  for  the  farmer.  After  a  night  of 
storm  these  crops  are  stacked  and  carted  and  car- 
ried, the  sea-wind  catching  away  loose  shreds  from 
the  summits  of  the  loads. 

Further  south,  if  the  growth  of  the  sea  is  not  so 
put  to  use,  the  shore  has  yet  its  seasons.  You 
could  hardly  tell,  if  you  did  not  know  the  month, 
whether  a  space  of  sea  or  a  series  of  waves,  at  Aid- 
borough,  say,  or  at  Dover,  were  summer  or  winter 
water ;  but  in  those  fortunate  regions  which  are 
southern,  yet  not  too  southern  for  winter,  and  have 
thus  the  strongest  swing  of  change  and  the  fullest 
pulse  of  the  year,  there  are  a  winter  sea  and  a  sum- 
mer sea,  brilliantly  different,  with  a  delicate  variety 
between  the  hastening  blue  of  spring  and  the  linger- 


The  Barren  Shore.  95 

ing  blue  of  September.  There  you  bathe  from  the 
rocks,  untroubled  by  tides,  and  unhurried  by  chills, 
and  with  no  incongruous  sun  beating  on  your  head 
while  your  fingers  are  cold.  You  bathe  when  the 
sun  has  set,  and  the  vast  sea  has  not  a  whisper  ; 
you  know  a  rock  in  the  distance  where  you  can 
rest ;  and  where  you  float,  there  float  also  by  you 
opalescent  jelly-fish,  half  transparent  in  the  perfectly 
transparent  water.  An  hour  in  the  warm  sea  is 
not  enough.  Rock-bathing  is  done  on  lonely  shores. 
A  city  may  be  but  a  mile  away,  and  the  cultivated 
vineyards  may  be  close  above  the  seaside  pine-trees, 
but  the  place  is  perfectly  remote.  You  pitch  your 
tent  on  any  little  hollow  of  beach.  A  charming 
Englishwoman  who  used  to  bathe  with  her  children 
under  the  great  rocks  of  her  Mediterranean  villa  in 
the  motionless  white  evenings  of  summer  put  white 
roses  in  her  hair,  and  liked  to  sit  out  on  a  rock  at 
sea  where  the  first  rays  of  the  moon  would  touch 
her. 

You  bathe  in  the  Channel  in  the  very  prose  of 
the  day.  Nothing  in  the  world  is  more  uninterest- 
ing than  eleven  o'clock.  It  is  the  hour  of  medi- 
ocrity under  the  best  conditions  ;  but  eleven  o'clock 
on  a  shingly  beach,  in  a  half-hearted  summer,  is  a 
very  common  thing.  Twelve  has  a  dignity  always, 
and  everywhere  its  name  is  great.  The  noon  of 
every  day  that  ever  dawned  is  in  its  place  heroic  ; 


96  The  Barren  Shore. 

but  eleven  is  worldly.  One  o'clock  has  an  honest 
human  interest  to  the  hungry  child,  and  every  hour 
of  the  summer  afternoon,  after  three,  has  the  grace 
of  deepening  and  lingering  life.  To  bathe  at  eleven, 
in  the  sun,  in  the  wind,  to  bathe  from  a  machine, 
in  a  narrow  sea  that  is  certainly  not  clear  and  is 
only  by  courtesy  clean,  to  bathe  in  obedience  to  a 
tyrannical  tide  and  in  water  that  is  always  much 
colder  than  yourself,  to  bathe  in  a  hurry  and  in 
public — this  is  to  know  nothing  rightly  of  one  of 
the  greatest  of  all  the  pleasures  that  humanity  takes 
with  nature. 

By  the  way,  the  sea  of  Jersey  has  more  the  char- 
acter of  a  real  sea  than  of  mere  straits.  These  tem- 
perate islands  would  be  better  called  the  Ocean 
Islands.  When  Edouard  Pailleron  was  a  boy  and 
wrote  poetry,  he  composed  a  letter  to  Victor  Hugo, 
the  address  whereof  was  a  matter  of  some  thought. 
The  final  decision  was  to  direct  it,  **A  Victor  Hugo, 
Ocean."  It  reached  him.  It  even  received  a  reply: 
*'  I  am  the  Past,  you  are  the  Future  ;  I  am,  £lc."  If 
an  English  boy  had  had  the  same  idea  the  name  of  the 
Channel  Islands  would  have  spoilt  it.  '*  A  Victor 
Hugo,  La  Manche,"  would  hardly  have  interested 
the  postal  authorities  so  much  ;  but  "  the  Channel  " 
would  have  had  no  respect  at  all.  Indeed,  this 
last  is  suggestive  of  nothing  but  steamers  and  of 
grey  skies  inland — formless  grey  skies,  undesigned. 


The  Barren  Shore.  97 

with  their  thin  cloud  torn  to  slender  rags  by  a  per- 
petual wind. 

As  for  the  children,  to  whom  belongs  the  margin 
of  the  sea,  machine-bathing  at  eleven  o'clock  will 
hardly  fiirnish  them  with  a  magical  early  memory. 
Time  was  when  this  was  made  penitential  to  them, 
like  the  rest  of  life,  upon  a  principle  that  no  longer 
prevails.  It  was  vulgarized  for  them  and  made 
violent.  A  bathing  woman,  type  of  all  ugliness  in 
their  sensitive  eyes,  came  striding,  shapeless,  through 
the  unfriendly  sea,  seized  them  if  they  were  very 
young,  ducked  them,  and  returned  them  to  the 
chilly  machine,  generally  in  the  futile  and  super- 
fluous saltness  of  tears.  '*  Too  much  of  water  had 
they,"  poor  infants. 

None  the  less  is  the  barren  shore  the  children's; 
and  St.  Augustine,  Isaac  Newton,  and  Wordsworth 
had  not  a  vision  of  sea-beaches  without  a  child 
there. 


THE  BOY. 


THE  BOY. 

>FTER  an  infancy  of  more  than 
common  docility  and  a  young 
childhood  of  few  explicit  revolts, 
the  boy  of  twelve  years  old  enters 
'upon  a  phase  which  the  bystander 
may  not  well  understand  but  may  make  shift  to 
note  as  an  impression. 

Like  other  subtle  things,  his  position  is  hardly  to 
be  described  but  by  negatives.  Above  all,  he  is  not 
demonstrative.  The  days  are  long  gone  by  when  he 
said  he  wanted  a  bicycle,  a  top  hat,  and  a  pipe. 
One  or  two  of  these  things  he  has,  and  he  takes 
them  without  the  least  swagger.  He  avoids  ex- 
pression of  any  kind.  Any  satisfaction  he  may  feel 
with  things  as  they  are  is  rather  to  be  surprised  in  his 
manner  than  perceived  in  his  action.  Mr.  Jaggers, 
when  it  befell  him  to  be  astonished,  showed  it  by  a 
stop  of  manner,  for  an  indivisible  moment — not  by 
a  pause  in  the  thing  he  chanced  to  be  about.  In 
like  manner  the  boy  cannot  prevent  his  most  in- 
nocent pleasures  from  arresting  him  for  an  instant. 


102  The  Bov. 

He  will  not  endure  (albeit  he  does  not  confess 
so  much)  to  be  told  to  do  anything,  at  least  in  that 
citadel  of  his  freedom,  his  home.  His  elders  prob- 
ably give  him  as  few  orders  as  possible.  He  will 
almost  ingeniously  evade  any  that  are  inevitably  or 
thoughtlessly  inflicted  upon  him,  but  if  he  does  but 
succeed  in  only  postponing  his  obedience,  he  has, 
visibly,  done  something  for  his  own  relief.  It  is 
less  convenient  that  he  should  hold  mere  questions, 
addressed  to  him  in  all  good  faith,  as  in  some  sort 
an  attempt  upon  his  liberty. 

Questions  about  himself  one  might  understand 
to  be  an  outrage.  But  it  is  against  impersonal 
and  indifferent  questions  also  that  the  boy  sets  his 
face  like  a  rock.  He  has  no  ambition  to  give  in- 
formation on  any  point.  Older  people  may  not 
dislike  the  opportunity,  and  there  are  even  those 
who  bring  to  pass  questions  of  a  trivial  kind  for 
the  pleasure  of  answering  them  with  animation. 
This,  the  boy  perhaps  thinks,  is  "fuss,"  and,  if 
he  has  any  passions,  he  has  a  passionate  dislike  of 
fiiss. 

When  a  younger  child  tears  the  boy's  scrapbook 
(which  is  conjectured,  though  not  known,  to  be 
the  dearest  thing  he  has)  he  betrays  no  emotion  ; 
that  was  to  be  expected.  But  when  the  stolen 
pages  are  rescued  and  put  by  for  him,  he  abstains 
from  taking  an  interest  in  the  retrieval ;  he  will  do 


The  Boy.  103 

nothing  to  restore  them.  To  do  so  would  mar  the 
integrity  of  his  reserve.  If  he  would  do  much 
rather  than  answer  questions,  he  would  suffer  some- 
thing rather  than  ask  them. 

He  loves  his  father  and  a  friend  of  his  father's, 
and  he  pushes  them,  in  order  to  show  it  without 
compromising  his  temperament. 

He  is  a  partisan  in  silence.  It  may  be  guessed 
that  he  is  often  occupied  in  comparing  other  people 
with  his  admired  men.  Of  this  too  he  says  little, 
except  some  brief  word  of  allusion  to  what  other 
men  do  not  do. 

When  he  speaks  it  is  with  a  carefiilly  shortened 
vocabulary.  As  an  author  shuns  monotony,  so 
does  the  boy  shun  change.  He  does  not  generally 
talk  slang  ;  his  habitual  words  are  the  most  usual  of 
daily  words  made  usefiil  and  appropriate  by  certain 
varieties  of  voice.  These  express  for  him  all  that 
he  will  consent  to  communicate.  He  reserves 
more  by  speaking  dull  words  with  zeal  than  by  us- 
ing zealous  words  that  might  betray  him.  But  his 
brevity  is  the  chief  thing  ;  he  has  almost  made  an 
art  of  it. 

He  is  not  "merry."  Merry  boys  have  pretty 
manners,  and  it  must  be  owned  that  this  boy's 
manners  are  not  pretty.  But  if  not  merry,  he  is 
happy  ;  there  never  was  a  more  untroubled  soul. 
If  he  has  an  almost  grotesque  reticence,  he  has  no 


104  The  Boy. 

secrets.  Nothing  that  he  thinks  is  very  much  hid- 
den. Even  if  he  did  not  push  his  father,  it  w^ould 
be  evident  that  the  boy  loves  him ;  even  if  he 
never  laid  his  hand  (and  this  little  thing  he  does 
rarely)  on  his  friend's  shoulder,  it  w^ould  be  plain 
that  he  loves  his  friend.  His  happiness  appears  in 
his  moody  and  charming  face,  his  ambition  in  his 
dumbness,  and  the  hopes  of  his  life  to  come  in  un- 
gainly bearing.  How  does  so  much  heart,  how 
does  so  much  sweetness,  all  unexpressed,  appear  ? 
For  it  is  not  only  those  who  know  him  well  that 
know  the  child's  heart ;  strangers  are  aware  of  it. 
This,  which  he  would  not  reveal,  is  the  only  thing 
that  is  quite  unmistakable  and  quite  conspicuous. 

What  he  thinks  that  he  turns  visibly  to  the  world  is 
a  sense  of  humour,  with  a  measure  of  criticism  and 
of  indifference.  What  he  thinks  the  world  may 
divine  in  him  is  courage  and  an  intelligence.  But 
carry  himself  how  he  will,  he  is  manifestly  a  ten- 
der, gentle,  and  even  spiritual  creature,  masculine 
and  innocent — *•  a  nice  boy."  There  is  no  other 
way  of  describing  him  than  that  of  his  own  brief 
language. 


ILLNESS. 


ILLNESS. 


HE  patience  of  young  children  in 
illness  is  a  commonplace  of  some 
little  books,  but  none  the  less  a 
fresh  fact.  In  spite  of  the  senti- 
mental, children  in  illness  remain 
the  full  sources  of  perpetual  surprises.  Their  self- 
control  in  real  suffering  is  a  wonder.  A  little  tur- 
bulent girl,  brilliant  and  wild,  and  unaccustomed, 
it  might  be  thought,  to  deal  in  any  way  with  her 
own  impulses — a  child  whose  way  was  to  cry  out, 
laugh,  complain,  and  triumph  without  bating  any- 
thing of  her  own  temperament,  and  without  the 
hesitation  of  a  moment,  struck  her  face,  on  a  run, 
against  a  wall  and  was  cut  and  in  a  moment  over- 
whelmed with  pain  and  covered  with  blood.  "Tell 
mother  it's  nothing !  Tell  mother,  quick,  it's 
nothing!  "  cried  the  magnanimous  child  as  soon  as 
she  could  speak. 

The  same  child  fell  over  the  rail  of  a  staircase 
and  was  obliged  to  lie  for  some  ten  days  on  her 
back,   so   that   the   strained   but   not   broken  little 


io8  Illness. 

body  might  recover  itself.  Every  movement  was, 
in  a  measure,  painful ;  and  there  was  a  long  cap- 
tivity, a  helplessness  enforced  and  guarded  by 
twinges,  a  constant  impossibility  to  yield  to  the  one 
thing  that  had  carried  her  through  all  her  years — 
impulse.  A  condition  of  acute  consciousness  was 
imposed  upon  a  creature  whose  first  condition  of 
hfe  had  been  unconsciousness  ;  and  this  during  the 
long  period  of  ten  of  a  child's  days  and  nights  at 
eight  years  old. 

Yet  during  every  hour  of  the  time  the  child  was 
not  only  gay  but  patient,  not  fitfiilly,  but  steadily, 
resigned,  sparing  of  requests,  reluctant  to  be  served, 
inventive  of  tender  and  pious  little  words  that  she 
had  never  used  before.  **  You  are  exquisite  to 
me,  mother,"  she  said,  at  receiving  some  common 
service. 

Even  in  the  altering  and  harassing  conditions  of 
fever,  a  generous  child  assumes  the  almost  incredible 
attitude  of  deliberate  patience.  Not  that  illness  is 
to  be  trusted  to  work  so.  There  is  another  child 
who  in  his  brief  indispositions  becomes  invincible, 
armed  against  medicine  finally.  The  last  appeal  to 
force,  as  his  distracted  elders  find,  is  all  but  an  im- 
possibility ;  but  in  any  case  it  would  be  a  failure. 
You  can  bring  the  spoon  to  the  child,  but  three 
nurses  cannot  make  him  drink.  This,  then,  is  the 
occasion  of  the  ultimate  resistance.      He  raises  the 


Illness.  i  09 

standard  of  revolution,  and  casts  every  tradition 
and  every  precept  to  the  wind  on  which  it  flies. 
He  has  his  elders  at  a  disadvantage  ;  for  if  they 
pursue  him  with  a  grotesque  spoon  their  maxims 
and  commands  are,  at  the  moment,  still  more  gro- 
tesque. He  is  committed  to  the  wild  novelty  of 
absolute  refusal.  He  not  only  refiises,  moreover, 
he  disbelieves  ;  he  throws  everything  over.  Told 
that  the  medicine  is  not  so  bad,  this  nihilist  laughs. 
Medicine  apart,  a  minor  ailment  is  an  interest 
and  a  joy.  **Am  I  unwell  to-day,  mother?" 
asks  a  child  with  all  his  faith  and  confidence  at  the 
highest  point. 


THE  YOUNG  CHILD. 


THE  YOUNG  CHILD. 


SHE  infant  of  Literature  "wails" 
and  wails  feebly,  with  the  in- 
variability of  a  thing  unproved 
and  taken  for  granted.  Nothing, 
nevertheless,  could  be  more  unlike 
a  wail  than  the  most  distinctive  cry  whereon  the 
child  of  man  catches  his  first  breath.  It  is  a  hasty, 
huddled  outcry,  sharp  and  brief,  rather  deep  than 
shrill  in  tone.  With  all  deference  to  old  moralities, 
man  does  not  weep  at  beginning  this  world  ;  he 
simply  lifts  up  his  new  voice  much  as  do  the  birds 
in  the  Zoological  Gardens,  and  with  much  the 
same  tone  as  some  of  the  duck  kind  there.  He 
does  not  weep  for  some  months  to  come.  His 
outcry  soon  becomes  the  human  cry  that  is  better 
known  than  loved,  but  tears  belong  to  later  in- 
fancy. And  if  the  infant  of  days  neither  wails  nor 
weeps,  the  infant  of  months  is  still  too  young  to  be 
gay.  A  child's  mirth,  when  at  last  it  begins,  is 
his  first  secret ;  you  understand  little  of  it.  The 
first  smile  (for  the  convulsive   movement  in  sleep 


114  '^^^  Young  Child. 

that  is  popularly  adorned  by  that  name  is  not  a 
smile)  is  an  uncertain  sketch  of  a  smile,  unpractised 
but  unmistakable.  It  is  accompanied  by  a  single 
sound — a  sound  that  would  be  a  monosyllable  if  it 
were  articulate — which  is  the  utterance,  though 
hardly  the  communication,  of  a  private  jollity. 
That  and  that  alone  is  the  real  beginning  of  human 
laughter. 

From  the  end  of  the  first  fortnight  in  life,  when 
it  appears  for  the  first  time,  and  as  it  were  flicker- 
ingly,  the  child's  smile  begins  to  grow  definite  and, 
gradually,  more  frequent.  By  very  slow  degrees 
the  secrecy  passes  away,  and  the  dryness  becomes 
more  genial.  The  child  now  smiles  more  openly, 
but  he  is  still  very  unlike  the  laughing  creature  of 
so  much  prose  and  verse.  His  laughter  takes  a 
long  time  to  form.  The  monosyllable  grows 
louder,  and  then  comes  to  be  repeated  with  little 
catches  of  the  breath.  The  humour  upon  which 
he  learns  to  laugh  is  that  of  something  which  ap- 
proaches him  quickly  and  then  withdraws.  This 
is  the  first  intelligible  jest  of  jesting  man.. 

An  infant  never  meets  your  eyes  ;  he  evidently 
does  not  remark  the  features  of  faces  near  him. 
Whether  because  of  the  greater  conspicuousness  of 
dark  hair  or  dark  hat,  or  for  some  like  reason,  he 
addresses  his  looks,  his  laughs,  and  apparently  his 
criticism,  to  the  heads,  not  the  faces,  of  his  friends. 


The  Young  Child.  115 

These  are  the  ways  of  all  infants,  various  in  char- 
acter, parentage,  race,  and  colour ;  they  do  the 
same  things.  There  are  turns  in  a  kitten's  play — 
arched  leapings  and  sidelong  jumps,  graceful  rear- 
ings  and  grotesque  dances — which  the  sacred 
kittens  of  Egypt  used  in  their  time.  But  not  more 
alike  are  these  repetitions  than  the  impulses  of  all 
young  children  learning  to  laugh. 

In  regard  to  the  child  of  a  somewhat  later 
growth,  we  are  told  much  of  his  effect  upon  the 
world  ;  not  much  of  the  effect  of  the  world  upon 
him.  Yet  he  is  compelled  to  endure  the  reflex 
results,  at  least,  of  all  that  pleases,  distresses,  or 
oppresses  the  world.  That  he  should  be  obliged 
to  suffer  the  moods  of  men  is  a  more  important 
thing  than  that  men  should  be  amused  by  his 
moods.  If  he  is  saddened,  that  is  certainly  much 
more  than  that  his  elders  should  be  gladdened.  It 
is  doubtless  hardly  possible  that  children  should  go 
altogether  free  of  human  affairs.  They  might,  in 
mere  justice,  be  spared  the  burden  they  bear  ig- 
norantly  and  simply  when  it  is  laid  upon  them,  of 
such  events  and  ill  fortunes  as  may  trouble  our 
peace  ;  but  they  cannot  easily  be  spared  the  hearing 
of  a  disturbed  voice  or  the  sight  of  an  altered  face. 
Alas!  they  are  made  to  feel  money -matters,  and 
even  this  is  not  the  worst.  There  are  unconfessed 
worldliness,  piques,  and  rivalries,  of  which  they  do 


Ii6  The  Young  Child. 

not  know  the  names,  but  which  change  the  faces 
where  they  look  for  smiles.  To  such  alterations 
children  are  sensitive  even  when  they  seem  least 
accessible  to  the  commands,  the  warnings,  the 
threats,  or  the  counsels  of  elders.  Of  all  these 
they  may  be  gaily  independent,  and  yet  may  droop 
when  their  defied  tyrants  are  dejected. 

For  though  the  natural  spirit  of  children  is 
happy,  the  happiness  is  a  mere  impulse  and  is  easily 
disconcerted.  They  are  gay  without  knowing  any 
very  sufficient  reason  for  being  so,  and  when  sad- 
ness is,  as  it  were,  proposed  to  them,  things  fall 
away  from  under  their  feet,  they  are  helpless  and 
find  no  stay.  For  this  reason  the  merriest  of  all 
children  are  those,  much  pitied,  who  are  brought 
up  neither  in  a  family  nor  in  a  public  home  by  paid 
guardians,  but  in  a  place  of  charity,  rightly  named, 
where  impartial,  unalterable,  and  impersonal  devo- 
tion has  them  in  hand.  They  endure  an  immeas- 
urable loss,  and  are  orphans,  but  they  gain  in  per- 
petual gaiety  ;  they  live  in  an  unchanging  tempera- 
ture. The  separate  nest  is  nature's,  and  the  best ; 
but  it  might  be  wished  that  the  separate  nest  were 
less  subject  to  moods.  The  nurse  has  her  private 
business,  and  when  it  does  not  prosper,  and  when 
the  remote  affairs  of  the  governess  go  wrong, 
the  child  receives  the  ultimate  vibration  of  the 
mishap. 


The  Young  Child.  117 

The  uniformity  of  infancy  passes  away  long  be- 
fore the  age  when  children  have  this  indefinite  suf- 
fering inflicted  upon  them  ;  and  they  have  become 
infinitely  various,  and  feel  the  consequences  of  the 
cares  of  their  elders  in  unnumbered  degrees.  The 
most  charming  children  feel  them  the  most  sensibly, 
and  not  with  resentment  but  with  sympathy.  If 
is  assuredly  in  the  absence  of  resentment  that  con- 
sists the  virtue  of  childhood.  What  other  thing 
are  we  to  learn  of  them  ?  Not  simplicity,  for  they 
are  intricate  enough.  Not  gratitude  ;  for  their  us- 
ual sincere  thanklessness  makes  half  the  pleasure  ot 
doing  them  good.  Not  obedience  ;  for  the  child 
is  born  with  the  love  of  liberty.  And  as  for  hu- 
mility, the  boast  of  a  child  is  the  fi-ankest  thing  in 
the  world.  A  child's  natural  vanity  is  not  merely 
the  delight  in  his  own  possessions,  but  the  triumph 
over  others  less  fortunate.  If  this  emotion  were 
not  so  young  it  would  be  exceedingly  unamiable. 
But  the  truth  must  be  confessed  that  having  very 
quickly  learnt  the  value  of  comparison  and  relation, 
a  child  rejoices  in  the  perception  that  what  he  has 
is  better  than  what  his  brother  has  ;  this  compar- 
ison is  a  means  of  judging  his  fortune,  after  all.  It 
is  true  that  if  his  brother  showed  distress,  he  might 
make  haste  to  eiFer  an  exchange.  But  the  impulse 
of  joy  is  candidly  egotistic. 

It  is  the  sweet  and  entire  forgiveness  of  children 


1 1 8  The  Young  Child. 

who  ask  pity  for  their  sorrows  from  those  who 
have  caused  them,  who  do  not  perceive  that  they 
are  wronged,  who  never  dream  that  they  are  for- 
giving, and  who  make  no  bargain  for  apologies — ^it 
is  this  that  men  and  women  are  urged  to  learn  of  a 
child.  Graces  more  confessedly  childlike  they 
make  shift  to  teach  themselves. 


FAIR  AND  BROWN. 


FAIR  AND  BROWN. 

[EORGE  Eliot,  in  one  of hernovels 
has  a  good-natured  mother,  who 
confesses  that  when  she  administers 
justice  she  is  obliged  to  spare  the 
offenders  who  have  fair  hair,  be- 
cause they  look  so  much  more  innocent  than  the 
rest.  And  if  this  is  the  state  of  maternal  feelings 
where  all  are  more  or  less  fair,  what  must  be  the 
miscarriage  of  justice  in  countries  where  a  blond 
angel  makes  his  infrequent  visit  within  the  family 
circle  ? 

In  England  he  is  the  rule,  and  supreme  as  a 
matter  of  course.  He  is  "  English,"  and  best,  as 
is  the  early  asparagus  and  the  young  potato,  accord- 
ing to  the  happy  conviction  of  the  shops.  To  say 
•'  child  "  in  England  is  to  say  "  fair-haired  child," 
even  as  in  Tuscany  to  say  "  young  man  "  is  to  say 
**  tenor."  "I  have  a  little  party  tonight,  eight  or 
ten  tenors,  from  neighbouring  palazzi,  to  meet  my 
English  friends." 

But  France  is  a  greater  enthusiast   than  our  own 


122  Fair  and  Brown.' 

country.  The  fairness  and  the  golden  hair  are  here 
so  much  a  matter  of  orthodoxy,  that  they  are  not 
always  mentioned ;  they  are  frequently  taken  for 
granted.  Not  so  in  France  ;  the  French  go  out  of 
their  way  to  make  the  exceptional  fairness  of  their 
children  the  rule  of  their  literature.  No  French 
child  dare  show  his  face  in  a  book — ^prose  or  poetry 
— ^without  blue  eyes  and  fair  hair.  It  is  a  thing 
about  which  the  French  child  of  real  life  can  hardly 
escape  a  certain  sensitiveness.  What,  he  may  ask, 
is  the  use  of  being  a  dark-haired  child  of  fact,  when 
all  the  emotion,  all  the  innocence,  all  the  romance, 
are  absorbed  by  the  flaxen-haired  child  of  fiction  ? 
How  deplorable  that  our  mothers,  the  French  in- 
fants may  say,  should  have  their  unattained  ideals 
in  the  nurseries  of  the  imagination ;  how  dismal 
that  they  should  be  perpetually  disillusioned  in  the 
nurseries  of  fact !  Is  there  then  no  sentiment  for 
us  ?  they  may  ask.  Will  not  convention,  which 
has  been  forced  to  restore  the  advantage  to  truth 
on  so  many  other  points,  be  compelled  to  yield  on 
this  point  also,  and  reconcile  our  aunts  to  the  fam- 
ily colouring  ? 

All  the  schools  of  literature  are  in  a  tale.  The 
classic  masters,  needless  to  say,  do  not  stoop  to  the 
colouring  of  boys  and  girls ;  but  as  soon  as  the 
Romantiques  arise,  the  cradle  is  there,  and  no  soft 
hair  ever  in  it  that  is  not  of  some  tone  of  gold,  no 


Fair  and  Brown.  i  23 

eyes  that  are  not  blue,  and  no  cheek  that  is  not 
white  and  pink  as  milk  and  roses.  Victor  Hugo, 
who  discovered  the  child  of  modern  poetry,  never 
omits  the  touch  of  description  ;  the  word  blond  is 
as  inevitable  as  any  epithet  marshalled  to  attend  its 
noun  in  a  last-century  poet's  dictionary.  One 
would  not  have  it  away  ;  one  can  hear  the  caress 
with  which  the  master  pronounces  it,  **  making  his 
mouth,"  as  Swift  did  for  his  '*httle  language," 
Nor  does  the  customary  adjective  fail  in  later  liter- 
ature. It  was  dear  to  the  Realist,  and  it  is  dear 
to  the  Symbolist.  The  only  difference  is  that  in 
the  French  of  the  Symbolist  it  precedes  the  noun. 

And  yet  it  is  time  that  the  sweetness  of  the  dark 
child  should  have  its  day.  He  is  really  no  less 
childhke  than  the  other.  There  is  a  pretty  anti- 
thesis between  the  strong  effect  of  his  colouring  and 
the  softness  of  his  years  and  of  his  months.  The 
blond  himian  being — ^man,  woman  or  child — has 
the  beauty  of  harmony  ;  the  hair  plays  off  from  the 
tones  of  the  flesh,  only  a  few  degrees  brighter  or  a 
few  degrees  darker.  Contrast  of  color  there  is,  in 
the  blue  of  the  eyes,  and  in  the  red  of  cheek  and 
lip,  but  there  is  no  contrast  of  tone.  The  whole 
effect  is  that  of  much  various  colour  and  of  equal 
tone.  In  the  dark  face  there  is  hardly  any  colour 
and  an  almost  complete  opposition  of  tone.  The 
complete  opposition,  of  course,  would  be  black  and 


124  ^^^'^  ^^'^  Brown. 

white ;  and  a  beautiful  dark  child  comes  near  to 
this,  but  for  the  lovely  modifications,  the  warmth 
of  his  white,  and  of  his  black  alike,  so  that  the  one 
tone,  as  well  as  the  other,  is  softened  towards 
brown.  It  is  the  beauty  of  contrast,  with  a  sug- 
gestion of  harmony — as  it  were  a  beginning  of 
harmony — which  is  infinitely  lovely. 

Nor  is  the  dark  child  lacking  in  variety.  His 
radiant  eyes  range  from  a  brown  so  bright  that  it 
looks  golden  in  the  light,  to  a  brown  so  dark  that 
it  barely  defines  the  pupil.  So  is  his  hair  various, 
answering  the  sun  with  unsuspected  touches,  not  of 
gold  but  of  bronze.  And  his  cheek  is  not  invari- 
ably pale.  A  dusky  rose  sometimes  lurks  there 
with  such  an  effect  of  vitality  as  you  will  hardly 
get  from  the  shallower  pink  of  the  flaxen  haired. 
And  the  suggestion  is  that  of  late  summer,  the 
colour  of  wheat  almost  ready  for  the  harvest,  and 
darker,  redder  flowers — ^poppies  and  others — than 
come  in  Spring. 

The  dark  eyes,  besides,  are  generally  brighter — 
they  shelter  a  more  hquid  Hght  than  the  blue  or 
grey.  Southern  eyes  have  generally  most  beautifial 
whites.  And  as  to  the  charm  of  the  childish  figure, 
there  is  usually  an  infantine  slenderness  in  the  little 
Southerner  that  is  at  least  as  young  and  sweet  as 
the  round  form  of  the  blond  child.  And  yet  the 
painters  of  Italy  would  have  none   of  it.     They 


Fair  and  Brown.  125 

rejected  the  dusky  brilliant  pale  little  Italians  all 
about  them;  they  would  have  none  but  flaxen- 
haired  children,  and  they  would  have  nothing 
that  was  slim,  nothing  that  was  thin,  nothing 
that  was  shadowy.  They  rejoiced  in  much  fair 
flesh,  and  in  all  possible  freshness.  So  it  was  in 
fair  Flanders  as  well  as  in  dark  Italy.  But  so  it 
was  not  in  Spain.  The  Pyrenees  seemed  to  inter- 
rupt the  tradition.  And  as  Murillo  saw  the  charm 
of  dark  heads,  and  the  innocence  of  dark  eyes,  so 
did  one  English  painter.  Reynolds  painted  young 
dark  hair  as  tenderly  as  the  youngest  gold. 


REAL  CHILDHOOD. 


REAL  CHILDHOOD. 


5 HE  world  is  old  because  its  history- 
is  made  up  of  successive  childhoods 
and  of  their  impressions.  Your 
hours  when  you  were  six  were  the 
enormous  hours  of  the  mind  that 
has  little  experience  and  constant  and  quick  forget- 
fiilness.  Therefore  when  your  mother's  visitor 
held  you  so  long  at  his  knee,  while  he  talked  to  her 
the  excited  gibberish  of  the  grown-up,  he  little 
thought  what  he  forced  upon  you  ;  what  the  things 
he  called  minutes  really  were,  measured  by  a  mind 
unused ;  what  passive  and  then  what  desperate 
weariness  he  held  you  to  by  his  slightly  gesticulating 
hands  that  pressed  some  absent-minded  caress, 
rated  by  you  at  its  right  value,  in  the  pauses  of  his 
anecdotes.  You,  meanwhile,  were  infinitely  tired 
of  watching  the  play  of  his  conversing  moustache. 
Indeed,  the  contrast  of  the  length  of  contem- 
porary time  (this  pleonasm  is  inevitable)  is  no 
small  mystery,  and  the  world  has  never  had  the 
■wit  ftiUy  to  confess  it. 


130  Real  Childhood. 

You  remembered  poignantly  the  special  and 
singular  duration  of  some  such  space  as  your  elders, 
perhaps,  called  half-an-hour — so  poignantly  that 
you  spoke  of  it  to  your  sister,  not  exactly  with 
emotion,  but  still  as  a  dreadful  fact  of  life.  You 
had  better  instinct  than  to  complain  of  it  to  the 
talkative,  easy-living,  occupied  people,  who  had 
the  management  of  the  world  in  their  hands — your 
seniors.  You  remembered  the  duration  of  some 
such  separate  half-hour  so  well  that  you  have  in 
fact  remembered  it  until  now,  and  so  now,  of 
course,  will  never  forget  it. 

As  to  the  length  of  Beethoven,  experienced  by 
you  on  duty  in  the  drawing  room,  it  would  be 
curious  to  know  whether  it  was  really  something 
greater  than  Beethoven  had  any  idea  of.  You  sat 
and  listened,  and  tried  to  fix  a  passage  in  your 
mind  as  a  kind  of  half-way  mark,  with  the  de- 
liberate provident  intention  of  helping  yourself 
through  the  time  during  a  fiiture  hearing  ;  for  you 
knew  too  well  that  you  would  have  to  hear  it  all 
again.  You  could  not  do  the  same  with  sermons, 
because,  though  even  more  fatiguing,  they  were 
more  or  less  different  each  time. 

While  your  elders  passed  over  some  particularly 
tedious  piece  of  road — and  a  very  tedious  piece  of 
road  existed  within  short  distance  of  every  house 
you  lived  in  or  stayed  in — in  their  usual  state  of 


Real  Childhood.  131 

partial  absence  of  mind,  you,  on  the  contrary, 
perceived  every  inch  of  it.  As  to  the  length  of  a 
bad  night,  or  of  a  mere  time  of  wakefiilness  at 
night,  adult  w^ords  do  not  measure  it ;  they  hardly 
measure  the  time  of  merely  waiting  for  sleep  in 
childhood.  Moreover,  you  were  tired  of  other 
things,  apart  from  the  duration  of  time — the  names 
of  streets,  the  names  of  tradesmen,  especially  the 
fournisseurs  of  the  household,  who  lived  in  them. 
You  were  bored  by  people.  It  did  not  occur 
to  you  to  be  tired  of  those  of  your  own  immediate 
family,  for  you  loved  them  immemorially.  Nor 
were  you  bored  by  the  newer  personality  of  casual 
visitors,  unless  they  held  you,  as  aforesaid,  and 
made  you  so  listen  to  their  imintelligible  voices  and 
so  look  at  their  mannered  faces  that  they  released 
you  an  older  child  than  they  took  you  prisoner. 
But — ^it  is  a  reluctant  confession — ^you  were  tired 
of  your  relations  ;  you  were  weary  of  their  bonnets. 
Measured  by  adult  time,  those  bonnets  were,  it  is 
to  be  presumed,  of  no  more  than  reasonable  dura- 
tion ;  they  had  no  more  than  the  average  or 
common  life.  You  have  no  reason,  looking  back, 
to  believe  that  your  great-aunts  wore  bonnets  for 
great  and  indefinite  spaces  of  time.  But,  to  your 
sense  as  a  child,  long  and  changing  and  developing 
days  saw  the  same  harassing  artificial  flowers 
hoisted  up  with  the  same  black  lace.     You  would 


1 3  2  Real  Childhood. 

have  had  a  scruple  of  conscience  as  to  really  dis- 
liking the  face,  but  you  deliberately  let  yourself  go 
in  detesting  the  bonnet.  So  with  dresses,  especially 
such  as  had  any  little  misfit  about  them.  For  you 
it  had  always  existed,  and  there  was  no  promise  of 
its  ceasing.  You  seemed  to  have  been  aware  of  it 
for  years.  By  the  way,  there  would  be  less  cheap 
reproving  of  little  girls  for  desiring  new  clothes  if 
the  censors  knew  how  immensely  old  their  old 
clothes  are  to  them. 

The  fact  is  that  children  have  a  simple  sense  of 
the  unnecessary  ugliness  of  things,  and  that — apart 
from  the  effects  of  ennui — they  reject  that  ugUness 
actively.  You  have  stood  and  listened  to  your 
mother's  compliments  on  her  friend's  hat,  and 
have  made  your  mental  protest  in  very  definite 
words.  You  thought  it  hideous,  and  hideous 
things  offended  you  then  more  than  they  have  ever 
offended  you  since.  At  nine  years  old  you  made 
people,  alas  !  responsible  for  their  faces,  as  you  do 
still  in  a  measure,  though  you  think  you  do  not. 
You  severely  made  them  answer  for  their  clothes, 
in  a  manner  which  you  have  seen  good  reason,  in 
later  life,  to  mitigate.  Upon  curls,  or  too  much 
youthfiilness  in  the  aged,  you  had  no  mercy.  To 
sum  up  the  things  you  hated  inordinately,  they 
were  friskiness  of  manner  and  of  trimmings,  and 
curls  combined  with   rather    bygone  or   firumpish 


Real  Childhood.  133 

fashions.  Too  much  childish  dislike  was  wasted 
so. 

But  you  admired  some  things  without  regard  to 
rules  of  beauty  learnt  later.  At  some  seven  years 
old  you  dwelt  with  delight  upon  the  contrast  of  a 
white  kid  glove  and  a  bright  red  wrist.  Well, 
this  is  not  the  received  arrangement,  but  red  and 
white  do  go  well  together,  and  their  distribution 
has  to  be  taught  with  time.  Whose  were  the 
wrist  and  glove  ?  Certainly  some  one' s  who  must 
have  been  distressed  at  the  bouquet  of  colour  that 
you  admired.  This,  however,  was  but  a  local 
admiration.  You  did  not  admire  the  girl  as  a 
whole.  She  whom  you  adored  was  always  a 
married  woman  of  a  certain  age  ;  rather  faded,  it 
might  be,  but  always  divinely  elegant.  She  alone 
was  worthy  to  stand  at  the  side  of  your  mother. 
You  lay  in  wait  for  the  border  of  her  train,  and 
dodged  for  a  chance  of  holding  her  bracelet  when 
she  played.  You  composed  prose  in  honour  of 
her  and  called  the  composition  (for  reasons  un- 
known to  yourself)  a  **  catalogue."  She  took 
singularly  little  notice  of  you. 

Wordsworth  cannot  say  too  much  of  your 
passion  for  nature.  The  light  of  summer  morning 
before  sunrise  was  to  you  a  spiritual  splendour  for 
which  you  wanted  no  name.  The  Mediterranean 
under  the  first  perceptible  touch  of  the  moon,   the 


134  Real  Childhood. 

calm  southern  sea  in  the  full  blossom  of  summer, 
the  early  spring  everywhere,  in  the  showery 
streets,  in  the  fields,  or  at  sea,  left  old  childish 
memories  with  you  which  you  try  to  evoke  now 
when  you  see  them  again.  But  the  cloudy  dusk 
behind  poplars  on  the  plains  of  France,  the  flying 
landscape  from  the  train,  willows,  and  the  last  of 
the  light,  were  more  mournful  to  you  then  than 
you  care  to  remember  now.  So  were  the  black 
crosses  on  the  graves  of  the  French  village ;  so 
were  cypresses,  though  greatly  beloved. 

If  you  were  happy  enough  to  be  an  internation- 
ally educated  child,  you  had  much  at  heart  the 
heart  of  every  country  you  knew.  You  disliked 
the  English  accent  of  your  compatriots  abroad  with 
a  scorn  to  which,  needless  to  say,  you  are  not 
tempted  now.  You  had  shocks  of  delight  from 
Swiss  woods  full  of  lilies  of  the  valley,  and  from 
English  fields  full  of  cowslips.  You  had  disquieting 
dreams  of  landscape  and  sun,  and  of  many  of  these 
you  cannot  now  tell  which  were  visions  of  travel 
and  which  visions  of  slumber.  Your  strong  sense 
of  place  made  you  love  some  places  too  keenly  for 
peace. 


Clic  CWtdreti,  by  Hltcc  fleynelU 
Decorations  by  CQUl  Bradley. 
Done  into  types  and  printed 
for  lobn  JUine  at  the  Olayside 
press,  SpHngffeld,  JMassachu- 
sctts,  in  December,  ^dcccxrvf. 


Alice  Meynell's  Essays 
and  Poems. 

Uniform  Edition^  in  Four  Volumes. 
Each  Volume  Price  $1.25. 


Mr  GEORGE  MEREDITH,  in  an  Article  on 

"Mrs  Meyneirs  Ess  ay  s,^^  in  The  National 

Review /or  August  i8g6,  says — 

Mrs  Meynell's  papers  are  litde  sermons,  ideal  sermons — let 
no  one  uninstructed  by  them  take  fright  at  the  title,  they  are 
not  preachments  ;  they  are  of  the  sermon's  right  length,  about 
as  long  as  the  passage  of  a  Cathedral  chant  in  the  ear,  and, 
keeping  throughout  to  the  plain  step  of  daily  speech,  they  leave 
a  sense  of  stilled  singing  in  the  mind  they  fill.  The  writing  is 
limpid  in  its  depths.  She  must  be  a  diligent  reader  of  the 
Saintly  Lives.  Her  manner  presents  to  me  the  image  of  one 
accustomed  to  walk  in  holy  places  and  keep  the  eye  of  a  fresh 
mind  on  our  tangled  world,  happier  in  observing  than  in  speak- 
ing. And  I  can  fancy  Matthew  Arnold  lighting  on  such 
Essays  as  I  have  named,  saying  with  refreshment,  "She  can 
write  ! "  It  does  not  seem  to  me  too  bold  to  imagine  Carlyle 
listening,  without  the  weariful  gesture,  to  his  wife's  reading  of 
the  same,  hearing  them  to  the  end,  and  giving  his  comment, 
"That  woman  thinks."  ...  To  the  metrical  themes  at- 
tempted by  her  she  brings  emotion,  sincerity,  together  with  an 
exquisite  play  upon  our  finer  chords  quite  her  own,  not  to  be 
heard  from  another.  Some  of  her  lines  have  the  living  tre- 
mour  in  them. 


THE    RHYTHM    OF    LIFE 

AND  OTHER  ESSAYS 

Fifth  Edition.     Fcap.  8-vo,      Price  $1.23 


CONTENTS. 

The  Rhythm  of  Life:  Deci-vilized :  A  Remembrance  :  The  Sun  : 
The  Floiver  :  Unstable  Equilibrium  :  The  Unit  of  the 
ff^orld :  By  the  Railway  Side  :  Pocket  Vocabularies  :  Pa- 
thos :  The  Point  of  Honour  :  Composure  :  0.  W.  Holmes: 
y.  R.  Lowell:  Domus  yiugusta  :  Rejection:  The  Lesson 
of  Landscape  :  Mr  Patmore" s  Odes :  Innocence  and  Ex- 
perience :  Penultimate  Caricature. 

OPINIONS  OF  THE  PRESS. 

Full  of  profound,  searching,  sensitive  appreciation  of  all  kinds  of  sub- 
jects. Exercises  in  close  thinking  and  exact  expression,  almost  unique 
in  the  literature  of  the  day. — The  Athtnceum. 

Both  in  delicacy  of  unhackneyed  thought  and  charm  of  style,  these  es- 
says are  the  most  stimulating  that  have  appeared  since  Mr.  Stevenson 
delighted  us  with  his  Virginibus  Puerisque.  To  appreciate  them  is  a 
step  forward  in  education.  We  are  conscious  as  we  read  that  hence- 
forth we  shall  look  on  life  with  a  finer  perception  and  more  discriminat- 
ing eyes. — 7he  Guardian. 

I  am  about  to  direct  attention  to  one  of  the  very  rarest  products  of 
nature  and  grace — a  woman  of  genius,  one  who  I  am  bound  to  confess 
has  falsified  the  assertion  I  made  some  time  ago  that  no  female  writer 
of  our  time  had  attained  to  true ''' distinction."  .  .  ,  Mrs  Mcynell 
has  shown  an  amount  of  perfection,  reason,  and  ability  to  discern  self- 
evident  things  as  yet  undisccrned,  a  reticence,  fullness,  and  effectiveness 
of  expression,  which  place  her  in  the  very  front  rank  of  living  writers 
in  prose.  At  least  half  of  the  volume  is  classical  work,  embodying  as  it 
does  new  thought  in  perfect  language,  and  bearing  in  every  sentence 
the  hall-mark  of  genius,  namely,  the  marriage  of  masculine  force  of 
insight  with  feminine  grace  and  tact  of  expression. — Mr  Coventry 
Patmore  in  the  Fortnightly  Riview. 

Mrs  Meynell  packs  into  two  or  three  little  pages  enough  thought  to 
equip  most  modern  writers  for  a  lifetime — Tht  St  Jamil's  Gaxitte. 

The  dominant  quality  of  Mrs  Meynell's  prose  is  reticence.  The 
prophet  of  silence  and  rejection,  the  herald  of  abstention  and  pause. 
..."  The  Rhythm  of  Life,"  "  Decivilised,"  "  Composure,"  are 
masterpieces  in  little,  and  they  stand  not  alone  in  excellence. — Tht 
Pall  Mall  Gaxetti. 

Gracious  essays,  packed  with  thought  and  virile  with  wit. — Tht 
Bttkman. 


NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON  :  JOHN  LANE, 
THE  BODLEY  HEAD. 


THE  COLOUR   OF  LIFE 

AND  OTHER  ESSAYS  ON  THINGS  SEEN 
AND  HEARD 

Fifth  Edition.     Fcap.  8-vo.     Price  $i.2J. 


CONTENTS. 


The  Colour  of  Life  :  A  Point  of  Biography :  Cloud:  Winds  of 
the  World :  The  Honours  of  Mortality  ;  At  Monastery 
Gates :  Rushes  and  Reeds :  Eleonora  Duse :  Donkey  Ra- 
ces :  Grass :  A  Woman  in  Grey  :  Symmetry  and  Incident: 
The  Illusion  of  Historic  Time :  Eyes. 

OPINIONS  OF  THE  PRESS. 

You  read  them  with  a  passion  of  delight  in  swift  sweetness  of  rhythm 
and  [cason,  their  magic  of  gracious  wisdom,  their  radiant  and  enduring 
ironies.  We  might  define  her  boolc  to  be  an  excommunication  of 
grossness,  of  spiritual  obesity  and  intellectual  opacity.  To  see  what 
this  writer  has  seen,  to  hear  what  she  has  heard,  is  a  lovely  lesson  in 
the  art  and  nature  of  life, — Tht  Daily  ChrtnicU. 

We  find  in  her  a  distinct  power  of  natural  observation  and  a  sounil 
critical  understanding  In  matters  of  art. — Th*  Timit. 

Mrs  Meynell's  work  is  marked  by  a  rare  originality,  distinctness, 
and  delicacy.  It  is  difficult  to  praise  too  warmly  the  liberal  judgment 
and  intelligence  that  find  utterance  the  most  artistic  in  these  reticent 
pages.  That  the  power  of  exact  vision  is  not  wanting,  appears  in  the 
two  brilliant  papers  on  "  Eleonora  Duse  "  and  "  Donkey  Races."  It 
is  safe  to  say  that  no  better  dramatic  criticism  has  been  written  in  our 
time;  and  the  other  Essays  are  worthy  of  them — the  work  of  an  obser- 
ver of  genius. — Pall  Mall  Gaxettt. 

Her  prose  at  its  best  is  the  purest  and  most  beautiful  of  all  prose.  In 
her  lightest  Essay  there  is  indicated  some  new  principle  or  significance, 
for  insight  into  which  all  understanding  readers  must  feel  that  they  arc 
permanently  the  better.  Mrs  Meynell  moves  at  an  altitude  and  with  a 
freedom  for  the  like  of  which,  at  all  events  in  any  female  writer,  we 
must  go  back  to  Madame  de  Guyon  or  St  Frances  de  Cbantal. — Th* 
Saturday  Rtview. 

Rare  fastidiousness,  delicate  grace  and  charm,  and  almost  unearthly 
loveliness  of  imagination — these  are  qualities  that  do  not  make  for  pop- 
ularity, but  they  are  the  very  salt  of  life  in  art,  and  in  them  lies  the 
secret  of  greatness.  Such  Mrs  Meynell's  work  makes  evident.  Either 
in  prose  or  verse  she  exalts  and  refines.  Her  every  thought  is  a  counsel 
of  tare  perfection. — Tht  Lteds  Mercury. 


NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON:  JOHN  LANE, 
THE  BODLEY  HEAD. 


POEMS. 

Fifth  Edition.      Fcap.  Svo.      Price  $1.25. 


She  sings  with  a  very  human  sincerity,  a  singular  religious  intensity 
— rare,  illusive,  curiously  perfumed  verse,  so  simple  always,  yet  so  subtle 
in  its  simplicity. — Tht  Athenaum. 

In  its  class  I  know  no  nobler  or  more  beautiful  sonnet  than  "Renounce- 
ment"; and  I  have  so  considered  ever  since  the  day  I  6rst  heard  it, 
when  Rosetti  (who  knew  it  by  heart),  repeating  it  to  me,  added  that 
it  was  one  of  the  three  finest  sonnets  ever  written  by  women. — Mr. 
William  Sharpe  in  The  Sonnets  of  the  Century. 

The  last  verse  of  that  perfectly  heavenly  "  Letter  from  a  Girl  to  Her 
Own  Old  Age,"  the  whole  of"  San  Lorenzo's  Mother,"  and  the  end  of 
the  Sonnet  "  To  a  Daisy,"  are  the  finest  things  I  have  ever  yet  seen  or 
felt  in  modern  verse. — Mr.  Ruskin. 

The  charm  is  of  the  intellect,  of  the  spiritual  emotions.  Intensely 
feminine,  and  yet  touched  with  an  abstraction  that  is  not  feminine  at  all; 
intensely  personal,  and  still  holding  an  indefinable  element  of  imparti- 
ality— these  strange  and  beautiful  melodies  appeal  to  the  imagination 
with  a  voice  as  of  unfamilar  things  brought  near;  melancholy,  with 
never  the  echo  of  a  whine,  sweet  with  an  almost  exultant  nobility  of 
sorrow. — The  Academy. 

How  many  of  those  who  are  today  buying  the  books  of  Mrs.  Alice 
Meynell,  the  greatest  of  living  English  women  poets,  remember  how 
long  ago  Rosetti  spoke  with  glowing  enthusiasm  of  her  sonnets  i  It  is 
is  no  exaggeration  to  say  that  they  hold  a  high  and  permanent  place 
among  the  noblest  poetry  which  this  generation  has  produced. — Th$ 
Literary  ff^orld. 

A  poetess  I  had  often  admired. — R.  L.  Stevenson. 

The  footfall  of  her  muse  wakens  not  sounds,  but  silences.  We  lift  a 
feather  from  the  marsh  and  say  :  "  This  way  went  a  heron."  .  .  . 
She  is  penetratingly  thoughtful.  And  profoundly  imaginative  her  poetry 
always  is,  even  when  its  emotion  is  too  instant  for  thought.  It  is  all 
(in  the  Roman  sense  of  the  word)  mere  poetry — poetry  with  no  allaying 
verse,  vinum  merum  of  song.  TA*  Tablet. 


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